Tropical Depression (2024)
Solo exhibition at INGAHEE Gallery
#102 20, 44 gil, Sowol-ro, Yongsangu Seoul, Korea
Text by Ben McBride
Curatorial Assistant, Photography Department
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
“…day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.” – W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, 1996
Presented at Ingahee Gallery, Tropical Depression is an exhibition of recent work by Jesse Siegel. The exhibition contains four distinct bodies of work tied together by Siegel’s ongoing investigations of memory, place, and cultural identity. Taking its name from the rotating storm systems that develop into hurricanes, Tropical Depression interweaves elements of visual memoir with research-driven explorations of natural and cultural phenomena.
Siegel’s Memory Photographs series (2021-2024) depicts windows, grates, electrical utility boxes, fences, and other elements of the built environment, which he has photographed, isolated, and rendered anew through 3-D modeling software. In 2021 during the lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, Siegel started taking pictures of mundane elements of the built environment that evoked recognition and specific memories. For instance, the distinctive taped window of Asterisk he encountered during a 2023 artist residency in Japan reminded him of nearly identical taping he saw during his youth in Cancún, Mexico. In both cases, the tape is intended to reinforce glass against oncoming storms.
However, the bold, graphic qualities of the images come to represent more than Siegel’s particular memories. While the use of photography roots the images of Memory Photographs in Siegel’s lived experience, his manipulation of the source material through the intermediary modeling software renders the elements as ghostly stand-ins for memory. The resulting work is familiar, yet elusive, and these qualities hint at Siegel’s larger explorations of how shared visual and environmental experiences can foster disconnect, recognition, or belonging.
Gilberto (2024) depicts the titular hurricane, which was a defining moment in Siegel’s early life in Cancún. The piece adapts commercial printing technology to apply archival radar imagery of the 1988 Hurricane to ceramic tiles with magnetic backings. As the sixty-four individual tiles are purchased and removed, the overall image degrades and fades away. The display references the presentation of magnets commonly available as trinkets at tourist shops and markets in Cancún. The piece also takes inspiration from Siegel’s encounters with Delftware, the iconic blue and white pottery in the Netherlands, and Okawachiyama Village, a popular tourist site in Japan known for its pottery production. In both cases the volume of production of tourist souvenirs and commercial designs has rendered the visual motifs and forms nearly indistinguishable from their referents.
Siegel’s Hi Mom/Hola Mamá series (2024) is a collaborative project between the artist and his mother, Anita Brown. Taken over the course of a single day, the works pair together photographs taken by Brown in Cancún with photographs by Siegel from Almere, Netherlands. Siegel and his mother used disposable Ilford film cameras, and the two exposed their rolls of film over the course of a single walk. The project highlights not only the connection between the two individuals, but the differences to their approaches based on the conditions of their respective “New Cities.” Both Almere and Cancún are planned cities that were constructed in the 1970s, and the work draws out the disconnect between their utopic commercial visions and the realities of daily life. As digital images become increasingly ephemeral and disposable through the course of daily communication, Hi Mom/Hola Mamá offers a chance to reflect on the relationship between media and temporality, emphasizing the material presence of images and their interconnections to memory and place.
a long time before a tree is a really a tree (2020) is a meditative and poetic work in which Siegel addresses and discusses his life experiences and memories of specific places. The time-based work combines interior vignettes of Siegel’s apartment with additional footage shown through screens within the environment. Through his voiceover, Siegel reflects on ideas of newness and belonging and their role in defining both memory and the rhythms of daily life.
Like the shared experiences brought about by storms and extreme weather phenomena, Siegel’s work in Tropical Depression points to the relentless and inescapable systems of globalism that flatten and displace regional cultural traditions and disrupt individual notions of identity. Yet, Siegel’s inquiry emphasizes the human need for shared visual experiences even when they are rooted in newness or sameness rather than tradition or difference. While Siegel’s work often draws out the discontinuities of experience and identify within the ever-shifting contexts and fragmentation of modern life, he also offers new points of recognition, contemplation, and ultimately, connection.
Photos by Choi Chul Lim