Images of war dominate 'Constant Battles' exhibition
By Ruth Latter / Daily Progress correspondent
June 30, 2005

“Art is an enrichment ... an awareness of history... a witness to centuries of change,” said art historian and critic John Canaday. “Art enlarges our experience of life.”

“Constant Battles,” the summer show at Second Street Gallery, is composed of an endlessly intriguing installation of images relating to war, sexual obsession and repression, and the unremitting competition among individuals and nations throughout history. It remains on view through Aug. 18.

Created with profound imagination by the North Carolina artist Anne Kesler Shields, the exhibit consists of artfully composed photocopied images that form immense murals along all of the gallery’s walls. The complex compositions are composed of relevant news photographs, provocative movie stills and advertisements, and enlarged reproductions of famous battle scenes painted by legendary artists. The visual and emotional impact is riveting.

Leah Stoddard, director of the gallery, said, “Shields loves art history and is especially drawn to the elements that are constant in human history and continue to survive.”

In exploring armed conflict through the ages, from competing gladiators to modern Army rangers, Shields portrays combat as a kind of tragic ballet.

Guns, thought by many to be Satan’s armor, are valued as symbols of power. A game of roulette suggests that life is a gamble - a game of chance.

The Twin Towers are shown before 9/11 rising above the clouds like a pair of unreachable castles in heaven.

Included in the vast agglomeration of images is the photograph of President George W. Bush looking stunned upon hearing of the towers’ destruction.

Slowly undulating across the surface of a lavishly illustrated panorama of war, barbed wire bares its angry “teeth.”

The human hand, which is intimately associated with human behavior, is depicted as both the holy hand that heals and the evil hand that kills.

In a perfectly ordered world, there would be no need for the purposeful investigation of human character and personality.

But our world is not perfect, and never has been. No artist was more aware of this than Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the great Spanish artist who was court painter to the king of Spain.

A portion of his famous painting, “The Third of May,” has been reproduced and included in this show. It portrays terrified Spanish subjects, suspected of being involved in an uprising, facing a French firing squad without ever having been brought to trial. Their terror is palpable.

In his recent biography of Goya, art critic Robert Hughes said, “He was the first painter in history to set forth the sober truth of human conflict: that it kills and kills again, and that its killing obeys urges embedded at least as deeply in the human psyche as any impulse toward pity, fraternity or mercy.”

Goya witnessed this scene from his studio and recorded it with intense feeling.

One of the most passionate French painters in the history of art, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) continues to be admired for his dramatic and theatrical renderings. A portion of one of his most famous paintings, “Liberty Leading the People,” as they fought in the streets of Paris during the Revolution while carrying the French flag, has been reproduced among the cluster of intriguing images in this show.

Delacroix described the art of painting as a “precious realm - that silent power that speaks at first only to the eyes and then seizes and captivates every faculty of the soul. Here is your real spirit,” he said, “here is your true beauty.”

The exhibition includes many images of warlike destruction and others that hint at sexual seduction. The war-wounded and the fatally injured are shown being carried off the battlefields. A bird soaring toward heaven suggests a winged soul departing a body after physical death. In another presentation, a chain-locked door prevents physical escape.

The artist who designed this visual symphony of graphic images that describe so well the anxieties of living in our troubled world should also create a future panorama focused on love.

In 1977 Benjamin Walker, a native of Calcutta, India, and a former diplomat in the Indian foreign service who wrote extensively on esoteric studies, also wrote about love.

He said, “Love is a hunger for unity, a cessation, even temporary, of being other or separate. It is a cosmic principle, rising over all levels of existence. It is the nearest thing to the hunger and thirst after divine experience that the saints and mystics speak about, giving one a beatific foretaste of heavenly joys.”

Viewing hours at Second Street Gallery at 115 Second St. SE (in the City Center for Contemporary Arts building) are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Ruth Latter has won numerous state and national awards as The Daily Progress art critic since 1964.


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