Walking into Anne
Scheid’s installation at Gallery 25 is analogous
to an ascent into another world. Spiritual messages
inscribed on the vestibule walls introduce the beholder
to the exhibit. Turning the corner from the elongated
entry hall—that Scheid characterizes as the
transitional zone—the gallery proper emerges
to welcome. The first in-sight comes with heroic,
powerful birthing images that explode with Herculean
speed and massive force. Two colossal figures lying
on their back are portrayed with legs encircled and
couched by arms. They are implanted on the high gallery
wall and cannot be deciphered immediately. Impossible
to conceive without distance, an encounter from eight
feet away provides a potential to discern head, legs,
arms and curving bodily forms. The human configurations
are built directly on the textured walls of the gallery,
radiating in black, gray and white to create bursts
of energy that at once project into the space of the
spectator and permeate the observer’s psyche.
Scheid has created a tripartite exhibit by separating
the gallery into three unequal spaces. The largest
space is divided, length-wise into halves. The left
wall is dominated by two colossal images and a prodigious
landscape defines the right wall. The third, a womb-like
space, is circumscribed by lofty and slender sheets
of mylar.
Opposite the first encountered space that sustains
the otherworldly, abstract forms, Scheid has drawn
a landscape that is comprised of inscribed mountains,
massive boulders, dynamic water and fleeting sky.
Scale becomes more easily realized. Supporting this
pervasive panorama are vivacious human figures, twisting
and turning in dance-like motion, apparently women
that appear as caryatids. Similar to the upright Greek
forms that brace the Porch of the Maidens of the Erechtheum
on the Acropolis, Nature’s consciousness is
perceived as women who acknowledge the realistic manifestations
of an external world. They seem to cushion an intrinsic
spirit, the unknown and ambiguous that Scheid solicts
and searches in her art. It is this mysterious dwelling
place that challenges the soul. Comparable to Bernini’s
St. Teresa in Ecstasy—a celebrated marble illustrating
the Counter Reformationary saint whose ability to
touch God physically and spiritually was legendary—these
human buttresses provide a “conduit” to
the internal presence of humanity.
Reflecting artists like Michelangelo and Raphael,
Scheid employs a grid system that furnishes a means
to transcribe her ideas from study to cartoon and
from studio to gallery wall. In addition, she uses
models, one inch to one foot, that parallel the scale
of the gallery.1
Evidence of this effort is an isolated figure appearing
on the wall at the far end of the larger gallery.
Rising vertically along this expansive space, the
virile image is drawn on two pieces of paper providing
insight into Scheid’s creative process. Admittedly,
Scheid needed more space to make manifest her ideas.
While the conclusive result is important, the process
is even more consequential and as observers, Scheid
gives us insight into a most complicated act of conception.
Equal to the divine creator, another Renaissance phenomenon,
the artist has the potential to give life and to take
it away. Although the process of creativity can be
traced, the genius of imagination can seldom be elucidated.
In the third space of the gallery, Scheid builds
an intimate, cocoon-like chamber that is separated
from the larger gallery by soft, sensuous twelve foot
walls of transparent mylar sheets. Rendered in malleable
grays that create a sense of continuity, these almost
transparent walls attract light and shelter the beholder
from an outer world. They appear as volatile, voluminous,
vaporous clouds after a fall rain, sustaining an introspective
but optimistic foundation for rejuvenation. The abundant
texture and ample tonality produce an infinite variation
of white, gray and black as well as a myriad of lines,
robust rubbings as well as smoother surfaces. Technique
reveals process. Although there is no certain design
for woman and man, a bold confidence emerges in the
positive forms. A singular human image represented
on the narrow wall of this guarded respite has dramatic
and deep-set eyes that look inward, reinforcing the
shrouded world of which we become a part. Suspended
between animate life and the transcendence of art,
we are invited to participate.
My first response, upon leaving the exhibit, was
to return to the protected ambiance that was an ephemeral
as human existence. I realized that in order to create
new life in the gallery, the installation would be
destroyed the following morning. Scheid explained
earlier that she perceives her art as a “metaphor
of life”. She sees the positive and the negative
of earthly experience.
“When we are gone we do leave our presence.
We alter and affect everything that we touch.”
In Gallery 25, Anne Scheid has captured corporeality
and spirituality, the essential transience that characterizes
both life and art.
Gina Strumwasser, PhD
Professor
California State University, Fresno
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Brochure Essay
Energy Is The Body
By Gina Strumwasser, Ph.D.
Gallery 25
September 1998
1 The French Baroque artist Nicolas
Poussin also created models for his paintings. He
composed a structure in which figures were moved until
the artist was satisfied. Then he experimented with
larger images from life-size models and ultimately
completed his painting. See Walter Friedlaender, Poussin,
New York, nd, 32-35.
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