JAMES SIENA

"In the early 1980s, when Siena was finding ways to inscribe his early work with recursive, mutating shapes, human beings were no longer being regarded as the measure of all things, and their knowledge was no longer considered to be subjective and all-encompassing. Instead, data was being outsourced to various intelligent machines, like computers, and humanity itself was being subsumed under the aegis of information networks. During this decade, science was viewed as extraordinarily relevant, and science fiction was increasingly understood as predictive not only of the future but also as constituting a stirring way to characterize the present."

- Professor Robert Hobbs in "James Siena's Recursive Art"

"In early 1983, soon after Siena moved to New York after graduating from Cornell University with a B.F.A., he became known as one of the seven members of the performance collective Watchface, while continuing to maintain a very active studio practice during that time. After the birth of his son Joe in 1988, he decided to give up his performance work for the privacy of drawing, painting, and sculpting in his studio. But even today, the all-important legacy of his five years of performing is evident in the bifurcating, diverging, and diversifying paths of lines found in his drawings and paintings, and it continues to imbue his intricately reticulated fields with concentrated energy. When viewers closely examine his art, they are, in a sense, engaging in their own performance of it, and their ensuing conclusions about how Siena’s intense oscillating and percussive shapes function as art provide additional opportunities for complementing its realization and meaning."

- Professor Robert Hobbs in "The Recursive Art of James Siena"

"Moving from the word 'pattern,' with its customary connotations of visual reification, to more supple ones enables us to stop relying on intelligence—commonly understood as a general mental ability and often used as a defining quality of Siena’s work—and to focus instead on how his art functions cognitively in several ongoing processes that involve not only the artist and his preferred media but also his viewers. The three serve as forceful adjuncts to the enduring creation of recursive artworks capable of creating mutual dependencies; together, they create an ongoing complementarity as well as an exhilarating and well- considered undermining of the traditional artist’s autocratic oversight."

- Professor Robert Hobbs in "James Siena's Recursive Art"