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Art Siegel began his career in Public Television, creating scenery and lighting for dramatic productions. He was also Production Manager on the Mr. Rogers program for several years. "In television, even more so than in theater, scenery needs to provide a convincing context for the action. In the closest close-ups and from all angles, the audience must feel that the action is occurring in a real place. Whether that reality is inside a courtroom, in front of a fantasy castle, or in John Adams' period home, everything that appears on the screen must serve as credible context for the story."
After a long subsequent career in sales, marketing and advertising, Siegel continues this same philosophy in the creation of his Kinetic Vistas (R) artworks. All of his major pieces integrate two elements. First are the photographs. Each presents groups of people moving and interacting, usually in a big-city setting such as New York or Milan or Boston. He approaches these images as a photojournalist, capturing spontaneous scenes of active metropolitan life. We don't know the characters in these scenes, yet we sense the story that is being told by their expressions, body language and interactions.
Then, drawing upon his television scenery background, Siegel integrates physical architectural elements into the work - hand crafted from wood and metal and plastic and other materials to create a scenery-like realistic context for the photography. So a panoramic photograph inside a subway station contains simulated iron girders and textured platform surfaces. A view of people in the Musee D'Orsay is surrounded by architectural ironwork evoking the museum's roots as an 1890's Paris railway station. Some of his newest pieces employ multiple layered photographs to convey a 3D sense of actually being there; as the viewer moves her head, additional elements are revealed.
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