Elise Siegel
[18][3][4] Curator and writer Nina Felshin identified these works as "concrete aesthetic parallels" to contemporary cultural theory, which revealed the role of clothing in definitions and transformations of female identity by, in essence, turning social construction "inside out so the stitching shows.
[3][6][28] The sculpture's rough, tangled construction equated garment straps—both intimate and strangling—with medical bandages, while its frayed, faded edges and Frankensteinian wire stitching evoked struggle and damage, conveying a sense of horror regarding the movement to surgery as reinvention, which wounded as much as enhanced women.
[6][3][28] In another series, Siegel explored apron forms, employing webs of wire that simultaneously read as (pubic) hair and skirt (e.g., Hairskirt, 1993), alluding to the garment's original function as a protection against the "polluting" power of genitalia.
[4][9] She initially produced fragments—ghostly heads, tightly clasped hands, dangling arms—before turning to installations of life-size, hollow doll or puppet-like figures, that Eleanor Heartney described as "psychologically complex tableaux of children of curiously ambiguous sexuality.
"[30][31][9] Village Voice critic Robert Shuster wrote that these works derived an uncanny, foreboding power from what he called "Siegel's process of golem-like creation," a schematic form of modeling that foregrounded a sutured together look with rotating parts and misalignments.
[2][4] The figures were arranged so that their playfully rendered stockinged feet nearly touched; Art in America's Nancy Princenthal wrote, "flexed and pointed, toes curled and spread, they communicate with uninhibited eloquence" an innocence so potent that it plunged viewers "into a total immersion in childhood.
[2][4] Siegel modeled the figures with boyish cropped hair, tight sleeveless t-shirts, and vague, somewhat helpless expressions of uncertainty that belied an aggressive scene Princenthal called "an unstable cloud of silent strife.
"[2][4] In I am what is around me (2007), Siegel created a similar grouping of unsmiling, nearly identical boys—upper halves, mounted on black stands—that seemed to enact a cultish playground ritual or game; in his review, Robert Shuster noted one boy who comes forward to present beseeching, blackened hands, implicating the viewer as a possible intruder or corrupter.
[34][11][35] This work draws on historical empowered objects, such as the Jōmon period Dogū and Haniwa funeral figures of prehistoric and third-to-sixth-century Japan, respectively, European iron helmets, Renaissance reliquary busts, idols and African masks.
[9][1][34][38] Their fleshy features range in modeling from naturalistic to lumpy and crude, with glazing that shifts from subtly layered patina-like surfaces to provisional and raw; most are fired in two pieces, leaving a visible crack at the base of the neck.
[34][1] Romanov Grave described her attention to the subtleties of expression, modeling and surface application as a vocabulary evoking "the injuries of the world as worn by the body … articulating the pathos, horror and eros of daily human experience.
