Home Is Where The Art Is: David Siever

David Siever a Brooklyn-based artist with a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramic Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017).  In 2017, he was the Artist in Residence at Arquetopia, in Puebla New Mexico and at A.I. R. Vallauris in Vallauris, France. In 2018, he was a Visiting Artist at the Australian National University in Canberra where he taught and worked on a series of sculptures about the experiences of Australian and Aboriginal soldiers in the First World War, utilizing the archives at the Australian War Memorial. In 2019 he was a Resident Artist at Project Art, working as the teaching artist at the Crown Heights Library. His work is in the permanent collection of the Kinsey Museum as well as A.I.R. Vallauris and was the cover of Chronogram Magazine with an accompanying story. He was also featured in Art.net as one of nine artists to watch for his show at the 2018 Governor’s Island Art Fair.

BROOKLYN, NY- David Siever’s work pays tribute- on a miniaturized scale- to the often overlooked characters and details surrounding history’s epic moments:

My work involves the footnotes of history – those protagonists who barely get a mention in the archives.  I create miniatures – roomboxes and dollhouses - contained spaces. Dollhouses, a form usually taken up by women and girls assembling images of imagined lives,  become the home of “alternative” narratives. Like the lives they depict, my ceramic figures are small, referencing the Staffordshire ceramics that celebrated the heroes of the Victorian era. 

Created from unglazed ceramic, the figures are fragile, uncomfortable in their skin; their survival is tenuous. Their lack of color reminds us that they are fading into the ashen white of obscurity, presence becoming absence, experience becoming memory.  They are also the size of my childhood action figures with whom I created stories. Like their juvenile counterparts, the sculptures have entered the domain of dreams, a place far distant from their origins. 

Prior to social distancing, David worked in a studio at Brooklyn College, where he is currently enrolled in their Graduate Program in Early Childhood Art Education. Now, without access to his workspace, he has been forced to improvise and carve out a new area in his home in order to continue creating:

Social distancing has forced me to move my practice into what is essentially a large closet in my apartment that I share with my partner’s clothing and hats, and a computer and printer.  I have had to buy miniature tools, like a jigsaw attachment  to my Dremel to work in such a small space, but I have made the place more homey by putting hundreds of archival prints and photographs that often serve as my inspiration on the walls. For years now I have been collecting my own archive of Victorian prints, illustrations, animal prints and lithographs. I love Le Petit Journal, a turn of the century French journal.

 As I don’t have the funding to hire a figure model, I serve as my own model for the sculptures, posing and taking “selfies” to get the positions correct, so you could say the art is truly personal.  All these aspects come together along with sculpting miniatures versions of myself in different period costumes with a toothpick for hours on end to make a somewhat unique practice.

I haven’t entirely solved the kiln problem, as my apartment wiring isn’t sufficient, and so my figures are carefully wrapped and kept moist, awaiting another day.  For now, I am happily building a church to serve as part of a rapture scene.

When it comes to finding inspiration for his sculptures, David’s process remains heavily research-oriented; he’s listens to historical audiobooks while working and has developed his own unique method of annotation that allows him to revisit specific excerpts within his growing collection of history books with greater ease. Recently, his focus has shifted towards the timely historical topic of the 1918 Spanish Flu:

I read extensively on the period in which I am working, searching for stories or images that speak to the emotions behind the larger drama. When I sculpt I always like to listen to historical audiobooks. Ideally it would be a book on the particular event I am sculpting to really help put me in what I like to call the "history zone". I then always buy the book in print also so I can underline passages that speak to me, or give me a visceral reaction (the words 'damn' 'woah' or 'jesus christ' can often be heard emanating from my studio) many of these passages often inspire future sculptures.

Underlining the books has sort of become a ritual in its self and is divided into 5 categories of importance (outside bracket, inside bracket, bracket and partial underline, underline and finally underline with dash/star) It all sounds kind of crazy… but each helps me to find certain passages when I go to relook through books in my burgeoning library when I am trying to find the perfect quote for a certain narrative

I have been currently doing a lot of reading on the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. To quote Bismarck, "What we learn from history is that no one learns from history" having just recently finished John Barry's The Great Influenza on the subject. Currently listening to The Butchering Art a history of the Heroic Age of Medicine and victorian surgery. And just ordered Eric Hobswam's Age of Empire on amazon yesterday (I can never have enough of the Victorians).

To learn more about David Siever’s work, visit his website davidsiever.com or follow him on Instagram at @davidsiever