Diana Greene Winston-Salem Monthly July 2008 Artist in Residence: Anne Kesler Shields

The explanatory text from Anne Kesler Shield’s installation piece, “View from the Towers,” concludes with her command: “Look for the connections.” Given the puzzle-like work she mounts on large stretches of wall using images culled from art history, photographs, and fashion ads, it’s impossible not to look for unifying threads amid the juxtapositions; how does Goya’s “The Forge,” for example, fit together with a photo of a soaring airplane?

Part of the answer is politics. Events following September eleventh, including the resulting war in Afghanistan and Iraq, are often the impetus behind her provocative installations. Battles, boundaries, flags, sex, and religion are just some of the themes tying her work together and landing her exhibitions in places like the North Carolina Museum of Art, Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, and Hollins University in Virginia. Each work is site specific, meaning designed with the museum or gallery’s dimensions in mind.

“It’s fascinating to me to see how things relate,” Shield says, standing in her Winston-Salem studio surrounded by thick piles of images clipped from art books and magazines. “Today we’re inundated with imagery. I’m trying to simplify some things, to make sense of the visual clutter.”

When Shield’s begins an installation, she takes collected images “appropriated” from other sources and push-pins them into patterns. The artist works toward her ultimate vision arranging and rearranging the disparate material into a big unified whole whose scale and substance reach toward the epic. Titles of her recent work speak to the scope of her creation: Entanglement, Boundaries, Ambiguities, Earthly Delights in the 21st Century.  

As she designs the images enlarged at the local print shop, Shield “plays” with repetitions, discovering as she goes. Within the mixing and imagistic comparisons, however, there is constancy: art history is always reproduced in color while everything else is black and white. This consistent contrast renders the past more vibrant, prominent, perhaps even more cohesive than the often fragmented and grainy contemporary black and white images. 

In “For the Flag,” exhibited at Coker College in South Carolina, a painting of Saint Nicatas with his ornamental sword and golden halo centers the installation. The past deepens what it means to fight a religious war, adding weight to the cluster of 27 panels that include flag-draped caskets, tanks, Donald Rumsfeld, Superman, a burning American flag, and architect Philip Johnson looking furious.

“The war started against the Taliban in Afghanistan and that’s a religious thing,” says Shields, whose two sons have served in the military. “But Americans don’t like to think of it like that.”

For all the seriousness contained inside these social commentaries, there is also elegant design, beauty, rhythm, and mystery. The images read left and right, up and down, in crossword-like patterns as not every space is filled; some crucial open shapes are created by absence. This element is a part of an minimalist architecture Shields considers vital in her work. Having started decades ago as an abstract expressionist painter, she’s maintained a spontaneous dynamism inside a frame and a keen eye for the essential.

Asked what she hopes viewers experience, Shields says only that “they spend some time” with the installation. Given the grand scale and compelling content of her work, this seems inevitable. After all, one doesn’t simply look at a Shield’s installation – that is too passive, one looks for things – for connections, harmonies, repeated themes that order the implied chaos, and, of course, the viewer looks for that most timeless quality of all, meaning.

When did you realize you were going to live a creative life?

I always liked to draw from childhood. I never wondered what I would major in at college.

Where do you find your inspiration?

From the world around me.  From the magazines.

What do you do to overcome a creative block?

Start doing something. Just play around with things. Inspiration doesn’t come out of the blue - it comes while you’re working.

What do you think of failure?

It depends on where your sights are. Sometimes you feel like a failure because you set your sights high. It should have something to do with the work. You can’t be afraid of it, you have to go ahead.

What quality do you most admire in other artists?

If they keep working. I think of Claude Howell; he kept painting what he did even when it went out of style.

What artists do you admire?

Right now John Baldassari, photographer Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg because he put different things together in a different way, and Piero della Franscesa.