Michele O - Review of Altered & Assembled

Review of “Altered and Assembled”
The “Altered and Assembled” exhibit at Lafayette College was a very interesting experience. The show was organized like most other local college shows I have attended, however, the work was very unique. Among a room with white painted walls hang individual worlds. There are even some microcosms on the floor in front of you. Some of the works were just placed on the ground, while others have special wires or planks to keep them standing. Some pieces are eye level on the wall, others are on the floor and you have to look down into them. The one thing every piece has in common is that they all have place cards starting the artists’ name, the name of the work, it’s dimension and components, and the year of it’s creation.
Indeed the pieces in this exhibit each seem to create their own world that the viewer inevitably will fall into and become a part of. One artist who work caught my eye as soon as I walked into the room was Ellen Siegel. The three-dimensional assemblages she creates seem to mostly be made of found objects. In her piece “Split”, created in 2006, Siegel uses pieces of wood, paint, and miniature figurines of a man and a woman going around in a circle in what appears to be a cuckoo clock. The Man and the woman are split from each other by a piece of wood - the spindle that spins them around in their dance, and above them written in blood-red script, it reads “SPLIT”. This piece evokes a feeling of detachment between two people. This feeling is brought on by the wood that separates them, the endless circle they keep going around in, and most obviously, the title of the piece and the words written above them, “SPLIT”. The cuckoo clock, the floral border, and the Bavarian look of the man and the woman give this piece a very European feel and its puts you in a whole other world.
This is just one of Siegel’s assemblages that are very thought-provoking and other-worldly. Siegel is just one of the many artists whose work was featured in “Altered and Assembled”, and all together it was a very impressive exhibit filled with many interesting pieces. Even though I was in a room in a college in Eastern Pennsylvania, these works allowed me to put myself in whatever world the artist had intended for me.