BEACH BLOCKS

Beach Blocks existed in real space, on site, for part of a Sunday. Only.It took many people to transport, assemble, and remove. It was an extraordinary day at the sea,with the light and the wind and the stone and the waves. And yes, the blocks too. The beauty of the setting, and our addition to it, gave us focus, and it gave us sadness to see it end so soon. A strong emotion was present that many of us shared. Thank you, all, Steven Siegel.

Steven Siegel builds on the rich tradition of using recycled materials and found objects to create artworks. Large boulders of compressed cans and plastic bottles , multilayered newspaper ridges and - in the Beach Blocks project - a large number of shoes , call attention to the abundant source material, yet stand on their own as sculptural forms in the landscape. We are reminded of the new human geology of landfills, a type of sedimentary deposition of waste transformed by the artist into temporary pods and monoliths.

Siegel's minimalist forms are richly nuanced, with the weight of thousands of experiences massed into bundles. Over the past twenty years, Steven Siegel’s works have been placed in museums, sculpture parks, corporate lobbies, nature conservancies, and universities all around the world. His commissions include: the Rinker Hall School of Construction at the University of Florida in Gainesville, design team work for Thornton Creek Environmental Learning Center in Seattle, and Jory, a commission for the Forest Ecosystem Research Laboratory at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

In addition to his outdoor commissions, Steven also exhibits smaller artworks of similar construction methods, and he is the recipient of numerous artist grants and awards, including artist exhibitions in : Italy , Denmark, the UK , Germany , and throughout the United States. Also of note are his artwork displays in the Biennale: Geumgang Nature Art Biennale of Gong – Ju in South Korea (2004 – 2008). Steven has also lectured and taught all over the world and his artwork was featured on the cover of Sculpture magazine in October 2003.

He is based in Red Hook, New York.

For more info on Steven Siegel go HERE

Assemblies of found objects, in this case shoes, made by Steven Siegel, combine sociological and geological points of reference, without forgetting the poetic view of urban life with the legacy of land art . His installations redefine the boundaries of surrounding space: sea, forest or clearing. Siegel conceives the place as a constantly moving dimension, modifying our senses and our perception of space itself. Known for his large-scale installations, assembled with waste material, newspapers and natural elements, in which the natural space surrounding us is never static and passive. Suddenly it changes, by shifting its boundaries and a dialogue between art and nature becomes possible mostly through artistic actions.