Aimée Farnet Siegel
A I M É E F A R N E T S I E G E L
Unhinge
27 February – 12 April 2019
PRESS RELEASE
27 February 2019 (New Orleans, LA) JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is pleased to announce Unhinge, the debut solo exhibition of Aimée Farnet Siegel. The New Orleans’ artist’s premier exhibition, comprised of works on paper, canvas and 3D sculpture, brings to light this artist’s unique process. Small, individually painted and assembled fragments of paper form Siegel’s objects which are dispersed throughout the center gallery space of JFG. This exhibition runs concurrent with the artist’s first museum solo exhibition and site-specific installation at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, entitled Principle of Uncertainty (14 March - 16 June). Unhinge will be on view from 27 February through 12 April 2019 with Arts District New Orleans’ (ADNO) First Saturday Gallery Opening on 6 April from 5 - 9pm.
The artist expands on the exhibition . . .
Flat, smooth, manipulated, pasted, wrought, rumpled and refigured – the works in Unhinge are a celebration and exploration of materials and colors that take shape in our shared environment. They have grown out of my work for Principle of Uncertainty, the site-specific installation at New Orleans’s Contemporary Arts Center. My new works explore relationships of line, color, and form --within individual works and, more expansively, across the gallery. While I have recently explored the volumetric potential of three-dimensional installation in other settings, Unhinge reinforces the importance of the container, the boundary, the constraint -- of the frame, the plane, and line, itself – as a structuring limit to be both heeded and defied.
Non-objective artist Aimée Farnet Siegel works with color and line through the medium of hand-painted and manipulated paper. Her works inhabit space outside the two-dimensional plane of paint on canvas and have a depth beyond collage and are closer in nature to assemblage.
Treating refined pulp much as a ceramicist would clay or a designer would bolts of fabric, Siegel renders, rents, and reassembles the tactile medium in creating two- and three-dimensional works. Working with 16-foot rolls of paper and miscellaneous fragments and glue, the results range from asymmetrical hangings to sculptural, free-standing figures.
Born in New Orleans in 1963, Siegel received her BFA from Louisiana State University and later studied at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She developed a career as a graphic designer and incorporated as Aimée Farnet Design Group in 1985.
Siegel began creating art in 2005. She has shown at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Art Center. She has since exhibited in solo shows at Barristers Gallery, New Orleans, and in group exhibitions with Blue Spiral Gallery, Asheville, NC and, in New Orleans at Second Story Gallery and Degas Gallery. Currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans is Siegel’s site-specific installation, entitled Principle of Uncertainty, in conversation with works in the international group show, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension.
Siegel teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts and is an independent curator. She has two grown children and works and lives in New Orleans with her husband.
For more information, press or sales inquiries please contact the gallery director Matthew Weldon Showman at 504.343.6827 or matthew@jonathanferraragallery.com. Please join the conversation with JFG on Facebook (@JonathanFerraraGallery), Twitter (@JFerraraGallery), and Instagram (@JonathanFerraraGallery) via the hashtags: #AimeeFarnetSiegel, #JonathanFerraraGallery and #ArtsDistrictNewOrleans.