Vancouver is crumbling. Or perhaps it‘s being methodically taken apart brick by brick. Whether for reasons of density, seismic upgrade or escalating value, old houses, schools, and movie theatres are being demolished to make way for the new. Referencing Derrida’s semiotic text, deConstruction is a series of phots + films that capture the dismantling of the city. By bringing dance to demolition, Siebens points out that ageism applies to architecture as it does to dancers' bodies. The bulldozers that pull down the empty shells are like surgical tools; they hesitate and meander before digging in, creating a dance, a conversation between static structure and the choreography of change.
Music: Chopin
Etude #1 + Preludes #4 + #13 + #21
Performed by Garrick Ohlsson
Artist Statement
Mapping choreography through media. A result of my personal history with dance and the moving body is a concern with translating three-dimensional movement, memory and emotion to the screen and still image, whether it be an improvisational dance, a flying car, crumbling houses, sweating bodies in a club or a sugar plum fairy. Decay has also crept into the work, whether deconstructed buildings or a body crumbling with age. The distinction between similitude and resemblance. Or the signifier versus the signified. Sometimes it’s funny to juxtapose J.S. Bach with bacchanalic ravers, but sometimes one inches one’s body, one’s films, one’s images towards the sublime…
EXHIBITIONS + SCREENINGS
BAF: BURRARD ARTS FOUNDATION Alumni Exhibition Vancouver, Canada July 2021
SNAP
Photographic Fundraiser for ACT
Photo selected for art auction
Toronto, Canada
March 2018
SPLASH
Arts Umbrella
Photo selected for art auction
Vancouver, Canada
October 2017
VANCOUVER ART GALLERY
Photo selected for art auction
Vancouver, Canada
April 2016
ISEA 2015
Curated screening in ‘Disruption’
Vancouver, Canada
August 2015
BAF: BURRARD ARTS FOUNDATION
Solo exhibit of Photos + Media
Vancouver, Canada
April 2015
WESTERN FRONT
Photo selected for art auction
Vancouver, Canada
February 2015
ON MAIN GALLERY / VIVO
Group Exhibition curated by Paul Wong
Vancouver, Canada
April 2014