Vigorous Voices:
Two galleries on Trade Street are showing works by two quite different local artists

By Tom Patterson | Winston-Salem Journalt
Published: April 12, 2009

Despite the global financial meltdown and other seemingly insoluble problems on all fronts, art evidently springs eternal. Accordingly, spring's arrival in the Piedmont Triad has brought with it a number of new art shows. Among those that merit special attention are two recently opened exhibitions in the Downtown Arts District that showcase works by two very different local artists with solid reputations for creative ambition and seriousness of purpose.

At 5 and 40rty…

At Artworks Gallery

Across the street at Artworks Gallery, Anne Kesler Shields has installed the latest in her continuing series of room-size installations thoughtfully juxtaposing large-format photocopies of imagery culled from historical and contemporary sources, including art history, advertising, world news and celebrity photography. Also on view through April 25, the installation is titled Ambiguities II, following up on Shields' first Ambiguities piece, which she showed at this same venue almost four years ago. The earlier installation consisted of four separate murals whose juxtapositions of appropriated imagery reflected a critical view of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Ambiguities II is one continuous photocopy mural spread across three walls and made up of 63 individual images or parts of images subdivided into a grid of 93 evenly sized, black-framed panels. Lacking the earlier work's dominant references to the World Trade Center's destruction and the war in Iraq, it presents a more complex, updated critical view of contemporary reality and its historical precedents. It's dominated by religious and/or political imagery, including cathedrals, mosques, portraits of saints and warriors, and crowds of people assembled for religious, military or political purposes. But it also includes a number of images highlighting the human body along with related vulnerabilities and fears.

Shields acknowledges the recent transition of presidential power with a centrally placed image of the vast crowd assembled in Washington for President Obama's inauguration. She has strategically positioned it near an image of the similarly large throngs in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963 for Martin Luther King's public address now known as the "I Have a Dream" speech. Elsewhere in the piece she has juxtaposed relatively contemporary images with carefully chosen artworks from earlier eras.

For example, a 1960s photograph of Muhammad Ali dressed as if for a boxing match but with several arrows piercing his bare torso is played off against Gerritt van Honthorst's depiction of Saint Sebastian, on whose iconic martyrdom the Ali photograph is based. Shields ups the metaphorical ante by including a proximate image of a carved wooden Mangaaka power figure from Africa's Kongo region, whose torso is densely pierced with metal spikes and nails.

Shields' Ambiguities II is a thoughtful meditation on life in a densely interconnected, sometimes violently contentious postmodern world where social, political and moral ambiguities prevail.