As our planet is gradually warmed and transformed into landscapes and environments once conceivable only in nightmare fantasy, we find ourselves preoccupied with our apprehension and perception of a world we’ve effectively made over – so bound up with our physical extension into it. These preoccupations are more or less encompassed in Fran Siegel’s recent body of work currently on view at ACME Gallery. The title, Reconstruction, alludes as much to intellectual and psychological as physical process. Landscape, no less than mapping, is a device for Siegel – a way to see over and through our unconscious projections into the physical world. She breaks down the methodology of our projection and reimagining into a kind of engineering grammar: contraption; apparatus; renovation; bridge. (Apparatus 03 features a pair of satellite towers.) Siegel is trying to merge the conscious and willfully imagined (or its symbolic equivalent – the ‘landscapes’ are far from literal) with physical actuality. Just as the most panoptic view effectively weaves together several angles of vision, Siegel literally re-weaves pieces of her fragmented, sedimentary ‘bird’s-eye’/aerial’ landscape into the abstracted Overland 18. It’s a bit of work to ‘connect the dots’; and Siegel has ambitiously reached well beyond our overloaded grid.  

ACME.
6150 Wilshire Blvd., Sp.1&2
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Show runs thru October 22, 2016