Artist:
Amie Siegel (born 1974 in Chicago, IL, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA).

Materials:
Two synchronized 16mm films, HD color video.

Description:
“Double Negative (2015) proposes ruptures between original and remake, artifact and copy, collection and preservation. Two 16mm films simultaneously project images of Le Corbusier’s iconic white Villa Savoye outside Paris, and its doppelgänger, a black copy located in Canberra, Australia. Each film has been printed on 16mm stock as a negative image, or polarity print, thus reversing light and dark. The Antipodean black Villa Savoye is, in fact, an ethnographic institute, dedicated now to the digital duplication of its extensive collections of anthropological films, photographs, slides and sound recordings, as Siegel reveals in a high definition color video. The work enacts the infinite loop of recorded artifacts—the urgency to document and record “vanishing” rituals and cultural practices becomes instead the contemporary archival impulse to copy vanishing media formats to digital. These concatenated elements extend the artist’s engagement with architecture as a foil, enacting and revealing across constellation-like works, layered sociological and aesthetic concerns.”
—“Museum Villa Stuck, Amie Siegel: Double Negative,” e-flux announcement, 2015.

“The materials Siegel is dealing with are explosive—especially in Double Negative, which charts the current discomfort in Western society with the history of ethnography, marred by colonialism. While these initially read like a poetry of small things, a meticulous cataloguing of spaces, places, and the things that fill them, they are actually a way of narrating the anxious meanings these take on with time.”
—Orit Gat, “Amie Siegel’s ‘The Spear in the Stone,” Frieze, May 24, 2016.