Photo by Wouter Le Duc
Jesse Siegel (b. 1984 in Cancun, Mexico) lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Siegel is an artist researcher working with photography, 3D rendering and video. His practice is concerned with the spread of a "global default" across built environments and mirrored in social constructs. He focuses on "New Towns" like Cancun, examining the erasure and creation of urbanized cultures, and exploring how identities are constructed not from uniqueness, but sameness. Siegel uses the corporate visual language of prefabrication and design, teasing out the opaque middle ground in the overlap between newness and nostalgia.
Born and raised in Cancun, a New Town founded in the 1970s by the Mexican government to increase tourism, Siegel focuses on the pitfalls of rapid growth and forgettable objects that can come to represent a collective memory. Having both Mexican and American nationality and speaking both Spanish and English at a native level has resulted in his works often deal with duality; both the execution and in content matter. He method of working; starting from a photo or reference drawing and building up the image via computer software, leads to ambiguous images that possess a physical and digital background.
Siegel holds a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, OR (USA) and an MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague (NL).
As an artist, he has exhibited work in the United States and Europe, and Asia. Most recently as part of the itinerant group exhibition "Fairy Tales" in Antwerp, Seoul, Tokyo and Mallorca.