Amie Siegel: Quicksand

Amie Siegel: Quicksand brings together a selection of the artist’s work across film, photography, painting and sculpture that address deep time and the evolving ecologies and economies of our material world. The exhibition is the first survey of Amie Siegel’s work in Spain and connects the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo’s former life as a 12th century Carthusian monastery, and later 19th century tile factory, to the traces of materiality, labour and belief therein. Presented in the monumental 15th century church areas, the exhibition offers a rare convergence between architecture and moving image, where a centuries-old religious space becomes a resonant chamber for contemporary reflection. In this charged context, Siegel’s explorations of material transformation acquire a heightened dimension, revealing how time imprints matter, just as belief imprints systems. 

Navigating elements of sand, water, gold, and marble, from a vast cosmic dimension to desert particles inside an hourglass, the constellation of works across the museum’s historic spaces exposes the invisible threads linking layers of circulation, economic fluctuation, and processes of constructing value, highlighting the artist’s characteristic deployment of matter and media that mirror the behaviours of the system they describe.

At the core of the exhibition is Siegel’s monumental multichannel video installation Asterisms (2021), exploring geological and social displacement on a planetary scale. Gold factories, oil recovery, artificial islands in the United Arab Emirates and the system of migrant labour that sustains their complex economy of production and speculation unfold in overlapping cinematic geometries projected onto a star-like shape that hovers between a wall and a sculpture.

The panoramic film Quarry (2015) traces the source of marble from a cave-like underground quarry in Vermont to its high-end destinations in Manhattan developments. Siegel’s Marble Dust Paintings (2019) were created from the sediment, water and vapor thrown off by the vast marble cutters that appear in her film Quarry. This ‘remaindered’ material, a milky sediment that dries into fine powder, is a key element of painting primers. Here Siegel considers how marble dust, a material from the medium of classical sculpture, becomes the sub-strata of the medium of painting. Her paintings continue the artist’s investigations into how value accrues, and how the mundane can be transmuted into the precious, performing a comparable alchemical act, transforming discarded dust into precious fine art.

Siegel’s sculptural installation Dynasty (2017) orbits around a fragment of pink marble from the lobby of New York’s Trump Tower. Purchased by the artist following the 2016 US presidential election, the work queries authenticity and belief, materiality and ideology. In the continuous slide projection Surrogates (2016), fragments, veracity and substitutes evidence again in moments of rupture and repair upon the bodies of ancient classical sculpture.

Listening to the Universe (2014) is a work on paper presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to know our sphere and beyond. This discreet suggestion is returned to in the artist’s new sculptural work, Hourglasses (2025), that condenses the duration of a film loop, the movement of matter, and the fragility of natural elements in an urgent reflection on how we traverse our increasingly fractured path across human and geological time.

Curated by Yara Sonseca Mas.

With thanks for additional support from Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown and Thomas Dane Gallery.