Panorama

Amie Siegel’s Panorama traces the complex processes of how cultural materials – once living – enter a museum collection and begin their afterlife as objects of display. The film brings to life a trove of dormant 16mm film reels the artist found in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s storage. Siegel re-edits these scenes of specimen collection across geographies and decades – scientists shooting birds, trapping butterflies, and felling mammals – as well as the creation of the museum’s dioramas to expose the extractive practices, Western perspectives, and indigenous labor shaping these collections. The artist’s film reveals the transformation of once-living animals into museum specimens – skinned, stuffed, and displayed. Siegel’s present-day filming then turns the encased displays into cinematic windows, where the animals’ glass-eyed gazes convey layered histories, ideologies, and aesthetics. Siegel has made visible their journey to the museum by connecting their former lives as roving and flying creatures with their now emphatic, unceasing stillness. Whether suspended within a dramatic display or placed side by side in storage drawers, the specimens portrayed by Siegel now hold multivalent narratives of other places, times, and the cultural subjectivities of their collectors. By tracing this process in all its complexity, the artist offers a view of the museum as a place of overlapping temporalities and contexts where meaning and value shift and accrue.

© Amie Siegel. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery.