March 2007

Growing up in a family that loved to photograph and document everything, artist Amie Siegel developed a sharply honed awareness of the image at an early age. As a child, the emphasis on the visual made Siegel question the way people present themselves — and the way they are presented.

A graduate of Bard College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Siegel works with film, video, sound, and writing. She strives to peel back the layers of human experience in its many forms to expose the often invisible concepts that lie beneath.

Recently, Siegel has begun working with remakes and re-enactments in order to reveal things we internalize. “We take things in without evaluating how they affect our thoughts,” she explains. Her recent two-channel video installation, “Berlin Remake”(which premiered at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival), for example, juxtaposes East German studio films with remakes by Siegel. The simultaneous display of these images, says Siegel, “reveals the past hidden within the present.”

A 2003–2004 DAAD Berliner-Kunstlerprogramm artist-in-residence in Berlin, Siegel is currently in the midst of her second residency at The MacDowell Colony, where she is working on editing “DDR DDR,” a feature film about the former East Germany. She describes the film, which consists of eight thematic sections, as “a portrait of a nation that no longer exists physically, but is a contested site of memory, history, and identity.”

At March’s MacDowell Downtown presentation, Siegel will present her 2003 hybrid documentary/fiction feature “Empathy,” a 92-minute film about psychoanalysis, voyeurism, and manipulation that examines the boundaries of public and private space. Siegel will be on hand to take questions from the audience following the screening.