Anne Kesler Shields pursues her critique of what has happened since Sept. 11, 2001
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Winston-Salem Journal
by Tom Patterson

HIGH POINT - It's been more than 10 years since Anne Kesler Shields shifted her efforts away from painting and printmaking to explore a more contemporary approach to art. With the exception of the portraits that she still occasionally paints on commission, her artistic output since that time has consisted largely of topically referenced, mural-scale installations - grid arrangements of photocopied images that she appropriates from printed news, entertainment, commercial and art-historical sources.

The works she made in this vein for the first several years functioned in large part as critiques of contemporary advertising, particularly fashion advertising. By juxtaposing fashion-ad imagery with reproduced details from various art-historical sources, she highlighted the ways in which the corporate world employs sexually and psychologically charged archetypal imagery to promote sales.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Shields has continued to pursue this appropriationist project, but the critique of advertising has ceased to occupy the central position in her art. Instead, her thematic focus has shifted to the sociopolitical aftermath of the attacks, including and especially the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Five of her latest works in this thematic vein are on view at the Theatre Art Galleries through Feb. 19 in a solo exhibition titled "Ambiguities." These works highlight the conflicts and uncertainties that surround the Iraq effort and other aspects of the so-called "war on terror."

In most of her previous photocopy installations, Shields, who lives and works in Winston-Salem, has used a wallpapering technique to attach the images directly to the walls of the galleries where they have been shown. The carpeted walls at this venue made that approach impossible, so she has subdivided these installations into individually framed panels, all but a few of which are uniformly sized at 16-by-20 inches. These framed panels, in turn, are arranged on the walls in groups ranging in number from seven to 35.

The show's smallest work and simplest composition is Cross Purposes, whose seven framed panels all consist of photos depicting veiled or masked figures and are arranged to form a Christian cross. As is typical of Shields' work in this vein, the thematic charge of this piece comes from its juxtapositions. For example, photos of women rendered anonymous by their traditional Islamic headgear appear in close proximity to a studio shot of a haughtily posed fashion model wearing nothing but a flimsy bridal veil. An image of a U.S. soldier wearing a gas mask is positioned so as to compositionally balance a photo of an insurgent fighter wearing a makeshift ski mask.

A feeling for composition is one of Shields' main strengths as an artist, and the most striking composition among these five recent works is the 28-panel piece titled Entanglement, measuring roughly 7-by-15 feet. Its seven central panels make up a grid excerpt from a reproduction of Francisco de Goya's painting May 2nd, 1808, which depicts a violent clash between Spanish soldiers and invading French troops. This art-historical imagery is juxtaposed with contemporary images of violence from the conflicts in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, which represent current geopolitical entanglements.

Barbed-wire images

The recurring motif that Shields has so successfully employed to visually unify the collection of varied imagery in Entanglement is that of barbed-wire strands, which appear in six of the panels that make it up. The barbed-wire images visually resonate with the tangled tree branches and thorns that appear in some of this work's other appropriated photos, including one that shows Mel Gibson with the lead actor in his film The Passion of the Christ, here depicted wearing a thorny crown. A close-up image of a roulette wheel suggests a visual center from which these barbed wires and thorny branches might be unspooling. Meanwhile, the roulette-wheel image metaphorically implies that the military efforts represented in some of this installation's other photos amount to high-stakes gambling.

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Shields made a number of works that incorporate photocopied images of the World Trade Center's twin towers and their fiery collapse after they were struck by jetliners. No such images are included in the High Point exhibition, although the twin towers are referenced in the title of the show's largest installation, Towers: 9/11 to Abu G.

This work's 35 framed panels are subdivided into three groups, including a central column made up of five uniformly sized panels, all slightly smaller than those that make up the rest of this piece and the others in the show. The varied images in this central column depict men - including a U.S. soldier and a Middle Eastern man - wearing sorrowful expressions that suggest the aftermath of tragedy.

Each of this installation's other two sections consists of 15 panels, and in them Shields has juxtaposed images of seductively posed fashion models like those who often appear in her work with photos of prison cells, an oil pipeline and burning vehicles. There are also photos of smokelike clouds, a smokestack belching smoke and bound prisoners in a desert setting, as well as two carefully chosen art-historical images - a Goya print that depicts dismembered corpses tied to a tree, and a painting of the Tower of Babel from a cathedral fresco in the Kremlin. In addition to its echo of the "tower" motif highlighted in the title, the latter image serves as an effective metaphor for the worldwide chaos that has followed the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like Sheilds' pre-Sept. 11 photocopy installations, those in this powerful show can also be accurately characterized as critiques of advertising. But in this case the advertising that she is critiquing is the Bush administration's continuing attempt to sell the Iraq war as a successful effort in the promotion of freedom, democracy and a more secure world.

Shields' show is one of several concurrently running exhibitions at the Theatre Art Galleries. Also of special interest among these is "Art in the Air," an exhibit of 31 works on paper that were recently selected as finalists and winners in a regional billboard competition sponsored by the arts councils of Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem.

Highlights of the latter show include the contributions by Molly Wimer Cook, Jack Hernon, Frank Holder, Robert Kernodle, Karry Kessler, Raul Montero and Ricky Needham.