Matt Siegle
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1980
United States
Good Weather
Matt Siegle has been living and working as an artist in Los Angeles, California since 2007.
Over the past two decades, Siegle’s multifaceted practice has interwoven drawing, painting, performance, photography, and sculpture to produce work that subverts the mythological construction of the United States. The work straddles different locations and points in history, from the northeast and the 19th-century transcendentalists to the southwest and the 1960s self-actualization and land art movements, through 1980s and 90s queer subcultures up to the present moment.
Siegle’s work is made with a corporeal precision and technical adroitness. Each series of sculpture incorporates an eclectic range of materials—from bronzed objects to the found and assisted readymade—and is carefully constructed into its final form.
The signifiers in Siegle’s work are culled from researched (and sometimes esoteric) sources, like town newsletters and environmentalist magazines found at the checkout of the local grocery store or queer coded language that points to concealed spaces and “alternative” communities.
The following nine audio files capture a recent dialogue between Siegle and Los Angeles-based writer Travis Diehl* in which the two converse about a plethora of topics that correlate with objects from the Autry Museum of the American West’s Collection. In their conversation, they highlight the significance to the artist’s work.
Beaded Vest (Listen 🔊 3:26)
by James Earle Fraser (Listen 🔊 4:30)
Bison Chairs (Listen 🔊 4:21)
Cahuilla Sandals (Listen 🔊 2:58)
Elephant Snot and
NALC Shirt (Listen 🔊 3:44)
Pomo Basket (Listen 🔊 1:44)
by Douglas Van How’d (Listen 🔊 6:18)
Presentation Revolver (Listen 🔊 9:44)
*Travis Diehl is Online Editor at X-TRA. He is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism.
Matt Siegle (b. 1980) is a Los Angeles-based artist. Exhibitions and performances include: Good Weather (North Little Rock/Chicago), The Luminary (St. Louis), YEARS (Copenhagen), Park View / Paul Soto (Los Angeles), NADA Miami Beach (Miami), SUNDAY (London), Artists Space (New York), Anthony Greaney (Boston), The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time (Los Angeles), Pomona College Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Kunsthal 44 Møen (Denmark), Et al. (San Francisco), Holiday Forever (Jackson, Wyoming), and Honor Fraser (Los Angeles). In 2022, he will participate in Who We Are in Time and Space, curated by Michael Ned Holte, at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts. Siegle’s practice includes critical and creative writing, and from 2013–16 he co-ran metro pcs, an artist-project gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2009) and currently teaches sculpture at Dartmouth College.