The explanatory text from Anne Kesler Shields’ installation piece View from the Towers concludes with her command: “Look for the connections.” Given the mural-like work Shields creates 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 painting The Forge, for example, fit with a photo of a soaring airplane? Part of the answer is politics. Events after September 11, including the resulting war in Afghanistan and Iraq, are often the impetus behind Shields’ 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.

Each work is site-specific, designed with the museum or gallery’s dimensions in mind. “It’s fascinating to me to see how things relate,” says Shields, 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 Shields 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 material into a big, unified whole whose scale and substance reach toward the epic. Titles of her recent work also speak to the scope of her creation: Entanglement, Boundaries, Ambiguities, and Earthly Delights in the 21st Century: Bosch Revisited.
As she designs the enlarged images, Shields “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 contrast renders the past more vibrant, prominent, and perhaps even more cohesive than the often fragmented and grainy contemporary black and white images. What’s old looks new and what’s new looks old, underscoring the artist’s observation that “human nature changes little over the ages.”

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 large cluster of 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.”
Aside from the seriousness contained in these works of social commentary, there is also elegant design, beauty, rhythmic movement, and mystery. Images read left and right, up and down, in crossword-like patterns. Not every space is filled; some open shapes are created by absence. This element is part of a 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 Shields installation — that’s too passive. Instead 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.

For information about Anne Kesler Shields, go to http://www.annekeslershields.com.

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 Baldessari,
photographer Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg because he put different things together in a different way, and Piero
della Francesca.