Babe Siegl’s artistic practice thrives at the intersection of painting and animation. In Dark Wreath, he blends the uncanny realism of virtually rendered objects and environments with the traditional execution and depth of Impressionistic oil painting on canvas. Dreamlike in their surreal physicality and bold chroma, his compositions glitter with the sheen of artificial reflections, specular globs of figurative approximations, and a stable of sexualized and gendered symbology. In embracing the unavoidable hybridity of modern image-making, Siegl hopes to illuminate the inherent hybridity of a modern queerness that must contend with its frictions.

Employing a cycle of digital dissection and painterly exploration, Dark Wreath’s compositions arrive at a greater swath of cycles contained within a contemporary queer identity matured against the backdrop of the Digital Revolution. Mirrors, duplication, coils and tethers all serve as metaphors used to allude to the patterns of harm endemic to the journey towards dispelling internalized prejudices and embracing self-acceptance. The gay male-gaze, toxic masculinity, competition, shame, and further trappings of the gender binary are imagined as Sisyphean loops—confusing, frustrating, and increasingly unnatural in appearance and sensation as they ripple and rupture throughout the digitally-saturated cultural sphere and embed themselves within our psyche.

While immediately stark and melancholic, the works are not without a sense of humor nor a sense of hope—the colourful, exaggerated characters within Siegl’s compositions feel animated with the potential and plasticity of youth, like toys from a chest or avatars from a video game. Whether poised for change, navigating moments of clarity, or approaching a threshold, the compositions contain a perceptible lilt in the cycle through their unquestionable hybridity—the ability to meet, accept, combine, and become something new.

MEDIUM(S)

painting

ARTIST BIO

Benjamin/Babe Siegl (he/him) is an artist living as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a painter, animator, and occasional curator hailing from the great state of Florida. His background in programming and curation has afforded close collaboration with a variety of local, national, and international artists and organizations. Recent projects include experimenting with 3D animation software in tandem with traditional painting practices and podcasting. Siegl received a BFA from Florida State University in 2011 and a MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017. He is a long term staff member of the Pride in Art Society, a Vancouver-based queer arts non-profit and charity.

Siegl’s creative practice is grounded in painting, drawing, and animation interwoven with digital methods of image production and manipulation. His paintings are concerned with a contemporary queer identity complicated by historical influence, mass image culture, digitality, and the evolution of eroticism. He is interested in points of friction, where the iconography of power has become suffused with modern concepts of nostalgia, sexual liberation, and masculinity. He is equally optimistic about the empowering potential of fantasy and creative play, ideas he seeks to embrace in his practice and present to audiences alike.