Whose Folk:
Gallery Guide
work by Cal Siegel
on view May 25th through July 28th, 2024
FRONT ROOM
1/ Muffler 1, 5, & 3
with Hand-Carved Sawbuck Display Stands
2023 & 2024, glazed stoneware, sandblasted stainless steel, oiled and ebonized american walnut
Cal Siegel
2/ Signed Window Pane
mid-19th century, etched glass
Zadock Pratt Museum collection
3/ Rent Strike Horns with Hand-Carved Display Stands
c. 1839, hand forged tin; 2023, american walnut
Zadock Pratt Museum collection; Cal Siegel
4/ Chamberstick, Cannonball with Hand-Carved Display Stand, Rat Traps, Photograph
various dates unknown, tin, steel, wood, silver;
2024, american walnut
Zadock Pratt Museum collection; Cal Siegel
5/ Handmade Bench
2024, stained pine, paper
Cal Siegel
At the gallery entrance, artist Cal Siegel presents the viewer with three ceramic Mufflers 1, 5 and 3 sitting on hand-carved sawbuck display stands; a reimagined symbol of modern American industry (1). Looking at his hand-crafted rendition of the automotive form, we might consider how our historical counterparts would have viewed the (now antiquated) objects Siegel has arranged across the room on Pratt’s desk: a chamberstick, a cannonball, two mechanical rat traps, and a photograph—all objects that would have been considered modern in their time (4). Through this juxtaposition, we are immediately confronted with one of the main inquiries the show poses: How does our understanding of history change when our vantage point changes?
On the windowsill behind the piano, is a framed pane of glass recovered from an original window during the 1976 restoration of the Pratt homestead (2). We can see the etched signature of Zadock Pratt’s son, George Watson Pratt, who died in the Civil War. This faint mark of the Pratt family name is a powerful symbol of the mark Zadock Pratt ultimately left on the town of Prattsville. His signature marks the land through this gesture, just as his familial history of industrializing the region did the same.
On the mantel at the center of the room, we see five tin horns, all poised on more of Siegel’s hand-carved stands (3). These horns were used in what is referred to as “the Rent Wars”. When the heirs of Stephen Van Rensselaer III came to collect on debts owed by the tenant farmers of the region, the farmers were in no position to pay them and they felt they had worked and cultivated the land and given it value in the first place, so why should they have to pay these outstanding debts? This all came to a head in a populist rebellion on July 4th, 1839. The horns were used as a call to arms. This story speaks to the history of this land and a refusal to be held captive to the will of a feudal system of peonage. Siegel’s supports enable these horns to stand up, creating a personification of an object employed to formulate collective action. In this new orientation, the shape of the horns references something more sinister.
The hand-carved display stands—as well as several other hand-carved works throughout the exhibition—are influenced by the “Tramp Art” tradition. Tramp art is a term used to refer to a style of woodworking or whittling that was a common decorative craft used to construct boxes, frames, and other wooden objects beginning in the later part of the 19th century. It employs the aesthetic of repetitive forms such as rectangles, squares, and triangles layered on top of each other.
Siegel’s Handmade Bench (5) features carved hands as its backrest. Though it is not an historic object, in the museum, it positions itself as one. The gesture of the hands brings us back to the signature on the window; the human touch through time has marked the landscape and us as its stewards.
DINING ROOM
6/ Handmade Table
2024, stained pine, paper
Cal Siegel
7/ Assorted Antique Bottles
19th century, ceramic, glass, aluminum
Zadock Pratt Museum collection
8/ Ceramic Bottles
2024, glazed stoneware
Cal Siegel
9/ Uncle Muffler’s
2024, wood, paper, stain
Cal Siegel
10/ Muffler 4
2023, glazed, sandblasted stoneware, wood, cast steel, rope
Cal Siegel
11/ The bottle in front of me and the frontal lobotomy
2023, wood, stain, paper, cork, glass bottles, photograph, brass
Cal Siegel
12/ It did it did it did it
2024, wood, glass, stainless steel, brass, aluminum, ceramic, jam jar lid
Cal Siegel
Who carries history and what are the ubiquitous containers that inform our lives and means of survival?
With the focus on the empty bottles and funnels, Siegel points to how history passes through time but also through us as its subjects. History is a living, breathing entity that shifts how we imagine our bodies. The bottles are an object of everyday life and become stand-ins for bodies who, through lives lived, pass on history orally, written, and as the unspoken language of embodied knowledge that we carry from generation to generation. For this room, Siegel made a table to hold every bottle he found in the museum, alongside three he’s created (6, 7, 8). Each bottle carries a unique story related to who used it and how it was used. This offers us another chance to consider all the possible incarnations of history and all the stories that have yet to be told.
On the walls hang a series of silhouettes of bottles cut in a paper-doll fashion referencing American craft. While sharing space with the physical bottles from the museum’s collection, Siegel’s works cast a shadow from the past onto the present. The funnels imply that something is pouring into these pieces filling it to a state of drunkenness. Drunkenness, sleepiness (as in the story of Rip Van Winkle), and forgetfulness are themes that recur throughout the show. Some of the work may seem as though it obscures the history they invoke; we might consider how it reflects the inherent forgetfulness that accompanies the culture of contemporary life. In this room of bottles, American handicrafts provide us with a way back to the surface of the material world that is here for us to engage with.
In It did it did it did it (12) one of the funnels is not a funnel but a clamp light. Here the realm of sculpture moves to the picture and points to how we see objects served up for our viewing consumption. Light and darkness intermingle in the checkerboard carving, pointing to an uncanny cinematic lens.
In Muffler #4 (10) the muffler is pouring out rather than soaking in, this implies an amplification of the sculpture’s interiority. The barrel is handmade by Siegel but looks drawn from the museum’s collection. This sculptural trompe l'oeil effect that he plays with throughout the exhibition points to how much of the material of contemporary life is an imitation of historical memory and makes the present a precarious redoubling. As Donna Haraway aptly puts it in her book Staying with the Trouble, “It matters what stories we tell to tell stories with.”
The bottle in front of me and the frontal lobotomy (11) explores the bottle theme further, this time with an actual bottle present, but corked. A photo inside a shut bottle might represent the repression of possibility. While historical objects are often perceived to have foreclosed histories, art can show us openings that expand our imagination. Here Siegel points to the roads being shut off from a desire to simplify their information and allows us to consider opening up narratives to expand definitions of different horizons.
BANK ROOMS
13/ Untitled
2024, silver gelatin print, hand-carved pine frame, plexi, brass
Cal Siegel
15/ Hat Mold, Barrel; Ceramic Vessels
various dates unknown, wood;2023-24, glazed stoneware
Zadock Pratt Museum collection;Cal Siegel
16/ Dad’s home III
2023, wood, steel, velcro, brass
Cal Siegel
17/ 18/ Grinding Stone, Butter Churn Handle
dates unknown, stone, wood, stone; 2024, hand-carved pine
Zadock Pratt Museum collection; Cal Siegel
19/ Toby Mugs
c. 1970, slip cast glazed ceramic
Zadock Pratt Museum collection
20/ Tin Funnel; Ceramic Funnels
date unkown, tin; 2023-24, glazed stonware
Zadock Pratt Museum collection; Cal Siegel
21/ Whose Folk
2024, stained pine, Danish paper cord
Cal Siegel
In Dad’s Home III (16), Siegel reveals how the aesthetics of contemporary middle-class lifestyle often derive from original colonial furniture. Within this cabinet, we see a set of stairs implying ascension or the idea of upward class mobility. A set of Rip Van Winkle Toby mugs are displayed along the front of the cabinet (19). Caricature jugs were made by the Royal Doulton factory, which started as a practical stoneware company in the late 1800s and grew into larger factories known for making novelties in the 1930s. This transformation from craft to industry is noted in the architecture of Siegel’s cabinet. According to Irving Washington’s story, Rip Van Winkle awakens twenty years after falling asleep, missing the American Revolutionary War altogether. Siegel is interested in these gaps in historical memory: What is the process of arriving from one moment to the next?
Across from the cabinet is a large barrel (15), most likely originally used for churning butter, which now serves as a counter for display. Siegel asks how history is sprinkled throughout our everyday lives, while the use and value of the object oscillates between roles. The barrel is a temporary storage unit, a transitional space for substances to exist before passing on to their next role. Such is how history churns itself into something new depending on who is telling the story. In finding new roles for the objects in the show, Siegel prompts us to consider: If we can change their roles, can we change our perception about who and what created these histories in the first place?
You will see Siegel’s ceramics scattered throughout the museum, often in service to his more sculptural work, and at other times hidden amongst the pieces that are part of the museum’s collection.
An Indigenous grindstone (17), part of kitchen life and possibly used for grinding up seeds, may seem abstract in the space and illegible, as does so much indigenous history that was eradicated from record with the settling of this land. This object offers a moment for us to consider what is lost when a people are effaced from historical narratives.
Much of the furniture and architecture you will encounter in the Zadock Pratt Museum is Neoclassical in style, popular to the times Pratt lived in. Characterized by an interest in rationality and balance, the Neoclassical movement revisited Greek and Roman classicism, reflecting an interest in their democratic values that the United States endeavored to emulate. In the final room of the exhibition, Siegel’s cordoned-off sculpture Whose Folk (21) is not quite furniture and not quite architecture. It prods at the Neo-classical pursuit of ‘perfect’ form, rather acknowledging that our environs are always made up of a fractured past. Here, Siegel employs his signature use of the Tramp Art style which points to the aesthetics of the masses rather than just rarifying the elite. The piece is placed behind a stanchion where we can only gaze at it. It is off-limits as it fails to find a function within the home.