Summary

Amie Siegel’s work often focuses on making visible the behind-the-scenes, unconscious operations of complex systems, investigating how value is constructed as her protagonists—archeological artifacts, furniture, paintings, marble, labor—move from one context to another, one time period to another. The artist’s recent research brought to light a trove of dormant 16mm film reels in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s storage that document scientific expeditions dating from the 1930s to 1970s. In Panorama, Siegel uses these source films of specimen field collection and the creation of the museum’s dioramas, along with her own contemporary footage, to create an entirely new, autonomous work of art.