Collection: Dawn Siebel
"The year before my father died he gave me all the old family photographs, some dating back to the beginning of photography. I was put in charge of the ancestors. Looking at the faces of relatives I never knew, I felt compelled to connect those faces with narrative and put them out into the world. Each painting begins with a black and white photograph collaged onto the surface. In my earliest story paintings I expanded the original setting of the photo to the whole surface and included literal stories with each. After a while, the paintings began to take a more surreal turn and I let the narrative be written by the viewer. Then I began to play with history itself by fitting the photograph into an iconographical image that belongs to the culture. Surprisingly, history is a pliable thing.
My last story paintings incorporated these old photographs with other collaged elements, including found paint-by-number boards - melding my work into the larger cultural landscape. This last work also carries some subtle mark of environmental degradation or distress."
