Outset was proud to support Amie Siegel‘s ‘Vues/Views‘ as part of Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York in November 2024.
‘Vues/Views‘ is a film installation exploring representations of race and national identity in a seemingly benign background medium—wallpaper. The artwork ‘Vues/Views‘ consists of two elements: a film projected on a panoramic floating screen and a custom panoramic wallpaper by the artist installed on the reverse side of the screen. The work “floats” in the middle of the exhibition space, with the wallpaper visible on one side and the film on the other, creating a dimensional object with multiple site-lines and sociological perspectives.
‘Vues/Views‘ unfolds without interviews or voice-over, allowing the viewer to determine their own relationship to the political dimensions of aesthetic experience, how wallpaper, usually treated as mere décor — can become a microcosm of larger, layered expressions of race and representation today.
The artist’s custom panoramic work on paper — for the reverse side of the film screen — was made from over 150 discarded rolls of the hand-blocked scenic wallpapers that the artist found at the Zuber Factory in France (subsequently given to the artist for this project). The resultant layered wallpaper piece deployed these original scenic wallpapers to subvert and question depictions of people, landscape and culture across time, using colour shift, layering, mis-registration and absence.
‘Vues/Views‘ is a featured, large-scale work with a dedicated ground floor exhibition space in the gilded Music Room of the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s 5th Avenue building, the former Carnegie Mansion. The curators hosted multiple talks about ‘Vues/Views‘ online, as well as a free, two-week online screening of the work over the duration of the year-long exhibition.
The work itself is a unique combination of digital (4K video) and work-on-paper.
ON VIEW: 1st November 2024 – 10th August 2025
