Natascha Seideneck: Uncanny Territory

Natascha Seideneck: Uncanny Territory by Tomiko JonesJanuary 3, 2016

©Natascha Seideneck

Currently, I am a Visiting Artist and Curator-in-Residence at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. This year offers the opportunity to design a year-long program across mediums that focuses on the environment through the lens of water-documenting narratives, engaging water as metaphor, as site of cultural practice, and locus of spiritual belief. Natascha Seideneck’s work is featured in the upcoming exhibition evanescence.

I first met Natascha when I moved to Denver, Colorado to coordinate and teach in the photography program at Metropolitan State University. Not only has she become a valued colleague, but also an ally and supporter, and a dear friend. Natascha integrates photography, video, appropriated images and installation. She often turns the image-based works into objects through her process of large scale printing, mounting and resin-coating. Through the years, I have watched her work progress and am thrilled to include selections from her projects Uncanny Territory and The Disaster Archive in the exhibition evanescence. evanescence is at Desai Matta Gallery in San Francisco and is on view until February 11.

Looking through the foggy lens of shifting weather patterns, environmental crises, and (un)natural disasters, the future may seem uncertain, but one thing is clear: things are changing. A sense of urgency arises – is it possible to not consider our impact?

Taking debris, pieces of maps, and discarded paint and oil, Natascha Seideneck creates miniature experiments–immersing these fragments in water, freezing them, and then bringing them back to room temperature. She photographs the changes from solid to liquid to evaporated gas, mimicking a geological cycle of freeze and thaw. Uncanny Territories are fictional landscapes, but could be anyplace on Earth.

Natascha Seideneck was born in Germany in 1967, grew up in England and now lives in Denver, Colorado. She has a graduate degree from School for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with an emphasis in photography and digital media and has been a visual artist for 20 years. Natascha has exhibited in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and New York. In addition to her photographic practice are location-specific works including Infinite Horizon, a public art commission for Denver International Airport, and site-specific installations for Colorado State University’s Behavioral Science Building and the Marriott Hotel. She has served on public art committees, presented at numerous art panels, and served on the Exhibition Committee at Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

©Natascha Seideneck

Uncanny Territory

The series Uncanny Territory is comprised of large-scale color photographs depicting otherworldly landscapes and is inspired by the idea of humans suddenly disappearing from our planet and how the earth might reclaim its territory. The images are made by constructing small ice sculptures and documenting the process of the objects melting. Within these sculptures I embed images printed on transparency, paint, sand, glass and other found objects. The visual representation of the object becomes something entirely different than the object itself, in part by manipulating the scale and lighting.