Paul Sietsema

Paul Sietsema (born 1968) is a Los Angeles-based American artist who works primarily in film, painting and drawing. His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”

Sietsema was born in Southern California and moved to Northern California as a teenager. He attended high school in Mill Valley and became involved in the Bay Area punk scene revolving around clubs such as the Mabuhay Gardens and the On Broadway in San Francisco in the early to mid 1980s. In 1992, Sietsema visited the first US solo exhibition of Jeff Koons, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which proved to be an influence on his early thinking and work.

Sietsema completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. He enrolled in UCLA's New Genres graduate program in 1996 and began studying with Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, receiving his MFA in 1999.

In 1994, the American painter Peter Saul included Sietsema in a group exhibition he curated in Austin, Texas. While a student at UCLA, Sietsema self-published a series of three books documenting the performances he made there, which were often sculpture based. During this time, he worked in the studios of Chris Burden and Charles Ray. Sietsema also met the artist Dan Graham while at UCLA, who included Sietsema’s early work in a group exhibition he curated at 303 Gallery in New York.

Sietsema’s first solo exhibition took place at Brent Petersen Gallery in Los Angeles in 1998, where he exhibited his first 16mm film, Untitled (Beautiful Place). Following this exhibition, Artforum published a feature article by Bruce Hainley on Sietsema’s work. Hainley included Sietsema in his 2000 group exhibition, “Mise-en-Scene: New LA Sculpture” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Untitled (Beautiful Place) was included in the large survey, “The Americans: New Art,” at the Barbican Gallery in London, 2001.

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