Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to present ‘Imitation of Life’, the first solo exhibition in Ireland of the internationally renowned American artist Amie Siegel, guest curated by Megs Morley.

This exhibition brings together two of Siegel’s most recent film works that both delve into the world of architectural construction and luxury real estate to expose uncanny  relationships between art, labour and value.

In The Architects (2014, Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture as part of Office US) the ceaseless tracking of the camera slices transversally through the city of New York, moving through various architecture studios, creating a seamless timeline that merge spaces and times. The camera takes in vast office spaces and gazes  uncompromisingly at the highly networked production of global architecture. Our view into this world is obscured by surfaces and layers of representation; facades, paintings, models, screens, windows – the very architectures of looking and seeing.

In her recent work Quarry (2015) Siegel traces the source of marble from a dark, cave-like underground quarry in Vermont to its high-end destination in Manhattan real estate developments. The orchestral soundtrack forms an emotive underpinning to the sleek interiors, echoing at times the aspiration of the luxury rendering. White marble, with its association to classical renaissance sculpture, is shaped and constructed into the interior surfaces of these luxury apartments, designed to bring even the most mundane spaces in closer proximity to the materiality and values of art.

Exhibited together for the first time, the two films underline Siegel’s distinctive tracking shots and sudden tableaux, to reveal and montage increasingly elaborate layers and strategies of re-creation and simulation. Ultimately the representation of living or life exposes a complex economy of production and speculation.

Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, USA) works variously in photography, video, film installation, performance and feature films for the cinema. Her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Amie Siegel: Provenance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Amie Siegel. Part 2: Ricochet at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Hayward Gallery, London; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; MoMA PS1; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Walker Art Center and the Zabludowicz Collection, London as well as TULCA 2011, Galway, and the current exhibition Everything Must Go at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and New York Film Festivals, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her work is in public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Kunstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation, a recipient of the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize, a 2012 Sundance Institute award, the 2014 Forum Expanded award at the Berlin Film Festival and a 2015 Creative Capital Award.

Megs Morley is an independent curator and artist, whose practice is primarliy interested in the role of art, cinema and archives in the political processes of shaping collective memory, power and history. Most recently she curated ‘A State within a State’ (the Galway Plastik Festival of artists moving image, 2015),  including among others; Harun Farocki, Duncan Campbell, The Museum of Non- Participation, Lawrence Abu Hamden, and Rabih Mroué. In 2014 she was the Curator in Residence for Galway City where she developed a year-long nomadic and pedagogical institution ‘The Para Institution’ (www.parainstitution.ie ). In 2012 she curated “Lines of Sight” an exhibition focusing on artists using moving image to mediate social conflict, political situations, traumatic memory and history–including Artur Zmijewski, Yael Bartana, Roee Rosen, and Avi Mograbi and more, developed while on residency in the Israeli Digital Art Centre Tel Aviv for EVA International 2012. Morley was also the curator of ‘After the Fall’; the 2011 Tulca Contemporary Art Festival, a city-wide international exhibition and public programme. She is the curator of the Artist-led Archive, a project documenting over 80 Irish artist-initiatives from the 70s’ to the present (www.theartistledarchive.com¬), currently housed in the special collections of the National Visual Arts Library (NIVAL)  Her film and moving image work made in collaboration with Tom Flanagan has been exhibited widely internationally in both film and gallery contexts.

Related events:

• Tuesday 23rd February: Artists talk: 5pm Studio 6 at TBG+S
• Tuesday 23rd February 6.30pm: Screening of DDR/DDR by Amie Siegel at the Irish Film Institute
• Wednesday 24th February 6.30pm:  Screening of The Daisy Chain by Polly Devlin, at the Irish Film Institute

With thanks to the Irish Museum of Modern Art.