PARADISE CORRUPTED: ANNE SHIELDS’ LATEST GALLERY INSTALLATION IS ON VIEW IN BOONE WHILE HER EARLY PRINTS ARE AT ARTWORKS
by Tom Patterson / Special to the Winston-Salem Journal/ Sunday, April 8, 2007
BOONE--When Hieronymus Bosch painted his iconic, allegorical triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights about 500 years ago, he evidently pushed his imagination to the limit in his effort to vividly illustrate a terrestrial paradise’s corruption by demonic forces.
The imagery in these three densely composed, visionary scenes--often nightmarish or weirdly erotic--is so bizarre and extreme that the painting still retains something of the discomfiting fascination it must have inspired when it was first shown to the public. For that reason it served as a prototype for the surrealists in the early 20th century, and continues to fire the imaginations of contemporary artists.
One such artist is Anne Kesler Shields, who pays homage to Bosch’s masterpiece and highlights his vision’s relevance to contemporary life in the photo-based installation she has created in the west wing of Appalachian State University’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts. Titled Earthly Delights in the 21st Century and on view through May 19, the piece encompasses the two visually interconnected floors of the center’s Mayer Gallery, including several large panes of adjoining two-story windows on its northwest corner.
Shields, a native of Winston-Salem, has been making art for more than 50 years. While her installation in Boone represents the latest phase of her work, a solo show that she has on view in her hometown revisits her extended foray into abstract printmaking during the 1960s and 1970s. The latter show, “Prints from the '60s & '70s,” at Artworks Gallery through April 21, consists of 30 original silkscreen and woodcut prints that Shields made between 1960 and 1978.
Together, the two shows reflect something of the extent to which Shields’ art has changed and evolved with the the times.
The prints at Artworks exemplify the systematic experiments with abstract form that occupied her during her years as an emerging artist. The earliest ones employ muted earth tones and landscape references, while the later ones include op-art compositions in Day-glo colors and more chromatically restrained, minimalist pieces. Not represented in these exhibitions is Shields’ work as a painter of commissioned portraits, which occupied her for much of the 1980s.
Shields’ Turchin Center installation is the latest example of a collage-based artistic strategy she has been developing since the early 1990s, built on the idea of juxtaposing art-historical imagery with still photos from contemporary magazines and newspapers--typically on a billboard-size scale. In a recent interview she said that she wants her work in this vein to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of great art from the past, and the fascination that certain types of imagery continue to hold for viewers over the centuries.
In Earthly Delights in the 21st Century, she has excerpted particular passages from Bosch’s painting and a couple of other art-historical sources, then photographically enlarged and strategically juxtaposed them in an open-grid format with enlargements of photos excerpted from contemporary print advertisements and news photographs. The juxtapositions emphasize striking similarities between Bosch’s imagery and the imagery of our media-saturated world, including sexually provocative ads and gruesome war scenes.
To remind viewers of what the entire, roughly 7-by-13-foot Garden triptych looks like--and give them an opportunity to locate the scenes Shields has taken from it--small-scale reproductions of the painting are on display in the gallery’s upstairs foyer.
As with several other full-gallery installations she has created in recent years, Shields began by making a scale model of the gallery itself, large enough so that she could use it to map the exact location of each image to be included. She made the model--now on view with her prints at Artworks--in her studio on the second floor of a commercial building she owns in the West End. This is where she also creates most of her art, including the commissioned portraits she still paints on occasion.
Shields earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Hollins College in 1954. In the late 1950s she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, took classes with abstract-expressionist painter Hans Hoffman in Provincetown, Mass., and earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of NC-Greensboro.
Shields’ first large-scale photocopy installations, a series she titled “Design and Desire,” highlighted the erotic dimension of contemporary advertising. She made them in 1993 and exhibited them the following year at Artworks.
Her installation in Boone isn’t the first one in which she has incorporated Bosch’s imagery. In 1996 she appropriated and enlarged a number of images from The Garden of Earthly Delights--and copped that work’s title--for an installation she exhibited the following year at Artworks. The contemporary images in that piece were almost entirely fashion- or sports-related. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the increasingly violent clash between the United States and Islamic fundamentalism has figured prominently in her art.
“If this installation makes you feel confused and claustrophobic, that is OK,” Shields wrote in a statement about her current Earthly Delights piece. “Twenty-first-century life is like that, coming at us from all directions.” Encouraging viewers to think about the ways in which the images play off of each other, she wrote, “Look for the connections.”
Anne Kesler Shields’ Earthly Delights in the 21st Century is on view through May 19 at ASU’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, at 423 W. King St. in Boone; for more information phone (828) 262-3017. Shields’ “Prints from the '60s & '70s” is on view through April 21 at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St.; for more information phone 723-5890. |