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May Issue 2003
Artworks Gallery in Winston-Salem, NC, Features Works by Anne Kesler Shields
Images of turmoil in the Middle East and the World Trade Center disaster are set against American popular culture in Anne Kesler Shields' new photocopy collage, Negative Spaces. The large-scale installation is on view at Artworks Gallery in Winston-Salem, NC, through May 23.
Shields says her work is an attempt to portray conflicting world views, particularly views of women. A life-sized Britney Spears is surrounded by crowds of shouting Muslim men, their arms raised in fists. Women in burkas share wall space with a colorful pile of designer shoes.
"I want to raise questions about our own culture by contrasting it with that of the Middle East," Shields says.
The twin towers of the World Trade center are suggested in the collage by blank spaces, which for the artist represent "the emptiness and insecurity we feel." The towers' shapes are placed both vertically and horizontally, so that they sometimes resemble, an equal sign.
Two horizontal mirrors hang in front of a large close-up of a collapsing Trade Center tower. The mirrors, according to Shields, are meant "to put viewers into the scene, making them part of it."
Running continuously along three walls of the gallery, Shields' installation is approximately 100 feet long and 8 feet high. The artist clips photographs from magazines and newspapers, then enlarges them many times with an ordinary photocopier. The blown-up images are glued directly to the gallery wall, where they bring to mind billboards.
Shields' photocopy collages
have been exhibited at Artworks, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary
Art and Salem College in Winston-Salem, and Long Island University
in Brooklyn, New York.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings
or call the gallery at 336/723-9850.
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