Paul Sietsema, At the hour of tea

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2014 by RITE Editions (here) and Sternberg Press (here). Softcover (8×6) with folding dust jacket, 160 pages, with 90 color illustrations and laser cuts throughout. There are no texts or essays. In an edition of 850, with a special edition of 50. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: While translations from one artistic medium to another have become more commonplace in our increasingly interdisciplinary art world, this trend in no way diminishes the brash innovation to be found in Paul Sietsema’s recent photobook At the hour of tea. We might assume that the normal progression of such rethinking might typically run from book to video, but Sietsema’s work goes in the opposite direction, turning smooth cinematic motion into a sequenced progression of page turns. Starting with a 16mm film (of the same name, first shown in 2013), Sietsema has reduced his film into a series of still photographic frames and then wholly reimagined them in book form with the help of some risk taking graphic design. As an integrated art object, it is one of the most structurally intriguing artist’s books I’ve seen in years.

Photographically, Sietsema’s stills take the contents and details of a traditional study/office/salon as their subject, the kind of room decorated with a leather bound desk set, crystal drinkware, strewn papers and clippings, an antique typewriter, and various objets d’art and collectibles (a gold pocket watch, a skull, some mottled rocky antiquities, some rare coins etc.). His pictures telescope in and out, from up close almost abstract fragments, to more recognizable forms, to puzzling rephotographed images of images left in the sturdy inbox. Together they capture a sense of dated privilege, where once useful cultural identifiers have become slowed down keepsakes and memorials, the entire environment a kind of ritual, complete with tea in the afternoon (according to the title) and likely whiskey soon after. Elements of history twist and turn in this gilded cage, from the text description of some unseen historical battle painting steeped in more modern analytical language, to the floating email icon deposited in among the felt and leather.

In a more standard photobook, Sietsema’s images would have settled into a gentle rhythm, with each page turn bringing us through his cinematic progression. But what’s so exciting about Sietsema’s book is that the pages are filled with laser cut interruptions that transform the sequence into something that stutters and jumps with electrifying uncertainty. There are large ocular holes that allow images from before and after to peer through, there are linear perforations that form frames, dividing lines, and geometric designs (almost follow the bouncing ball or bread crumb style), and there are full page arrays of dots that turn the images into inscrutable mesh-like screens; near the end, there are even words made of holes, introducing another layer of textual commentary via subtraction rather than addition. Each page turn becomes a delightful discovery, not only of the sequential imagery of Sietsema’s quasi-narrative, but of the unexpected design elements that enhance the experience. The paper effects (if we can call them that) serve to integrate the pictures in new ways, allowing them to partially wander out of the standard one after another order, like echoes that are still audible.

Seen together, Sietsema’s photobook combines a sense of outmoded grandeur with the crispness of the digital age – it is both lovingly textural as it lingers over the tactile surfaces of the featured objects and rigidly geometric in its physical interventions. While such a design could easily have fallen into the trap of publishing gimmickry, I found the book enchanting. It’s the kind of impressive object that will appeal to those intrigued by out-of-the-box thinking.

Collector’s POV: Paul Sietsema is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (here).

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Read more about: Paul Sietsema, RITE Editions, Sternberg Press

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