RANA SIEGEL – A SITUATION AMONG PARTS

A situation among parts
seeing the space as a stage set where the pieces are characters
responding, responsive
catching a scene at a particular moment and in that moment pausing, until

Empathetic gestures
collapsing, clinging to, and holding on
finding the balance, creating tension
points where they settle, resting upon

Acting with and within each part
engaging with a certain delicateness, level of concentration, and sensitivity
opening up a dialogue among the parts

A thread connecting two wooden beams in the gallery installation "Drawn" (2008): Like a line in a drawing the curved filament defines the space around and creates tension within the composition. The thread reminds one of a suspension cable of a rope bridge, but it is unburdened and slack for its only duty is to make space palpable.

Rana Siegel arranges objects in space, whether in the three- or two-dimensional space. The thread, the line, the fiber appears in every work. In her current exhibition, a piece of woven tissue, in itself a perfect composition of horizontal and vertical filaments is clinging to a plank. It seems to gently flatter the wood, the woolen fibers akin to the wood fibers arranged by nature in a similar way. Drawing a line or spinning cotton to a thread (like in "Run On"): It's a manifestation of time running for the working process; line and thread are the documentation of period of time, a span of life.

In "Breadth", an installation that will be shown in Berlin next year, Rana Siegel uses smoke to create drawings. But whereas the Czech artist Jiri Dokupil uses the surrealist's technique "fumage" to produce smoke on the surface of the paper while conducting a candle's flame beneath, Rana Siegel applies it directly on the landscape format piece.

These drawings are like sketches of recorded speech. The sound waves seem to proceed along a timeline, oscillating in different frequencies and amplitudes. And they appear to communicate with each other for every wave is curved, bended by an invisible force like in a magnetic field. In the "Situation Among Parts", in the midst of the channel between emitter and receiver, the sound waves begin an independent existence like every object in Rana Siegel's works. Object? Threads, lines, and fibers rather become subjects chatting and whispering with each other in vivid dialogue.

RANA SIEGEL earned her BFA in Crafts with a concentration in Fibers from The University of the Arts '01, in Philadelphia, and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago '08. She has participated in several group exhibitions in Chicago and is presently teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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