Robert Seng was born and raised in Seattle, served in the US Navy in Vietnam, and finished his BFA and MFA on the GI Bill. He was a founder of Artech, Seattle’s premier art services company, to support his art career. A New York resident since 1986, Seng has worked at Artforum, the Guggenheim Museum and taught at Fairfield University while continuing his studio practice in painting and sculpture.
In the mid 1990’s Seng moved into site-specific installation work with collaborator Lisa Hein. Together they have made more than 40 projects with moving light, air, and water. They share joint awards from NYFA, MacDowell and Yaddo. Meanwhile in his own drawing practice, Seng continues to carve and scrape collages made from EXIT signs. In these works, EXITs watch their own disintegration and transformation into what “safe” place might lie beyond the ubiquitous sign. These have been shown throughout the Americas, in group exhibits in places as Pierogi and Flipside in Brooklyn, Another Year in LA, the Painting International Biennial in Guayquil, Ecuador, and more recently at Centotto in Bushwick, Talking Pictures in Bed-Stuy, and Sideshow in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
These "carved" EXIT signs are built up by cutting, scraping, and collaging elements of readymade EXIT signs. They look backwards to analog times of labor, craft, marquetry, quilts, and forward to a new virtual EXIT.
Bob Seng came of age in the 1960’s, which was highly charged with wars, social unrest, and looming nuclear apocalypse. Graphic style was high contrast to match. Currently the artist feels a similar global tension. Media and politics are polarizing the lives of societies into black and white, black and red.
These redesigned EXIT signs offer possible destinations, maps, escape routes and strategies, while describing the overheated environment.
They are records of EXIT signs disintegrating and reforming into a place beyond the EXIT itself. Seng sees them as fragments, screen grabs of our world. They are a momentary diversion from our ongoing cataclysm.
