Walking into Anne Scheid’s installation at Gallery 25 is analogous to an ascent into another world. Spiritual messages inscribed on vestibule walls introduce the beholder to the exhibit. Turning the corner from the elongated entry hall– that Scheid characterizes as a 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, and 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 on 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 solicits and searches in her art. It is this mysterious dwelling place that challenges the soul. Comparable to Bernini’s St. Teresa and 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 phenomena, 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 and intimate, cocoon–like chamber that is separated from the larger gallery by soft, sensuous twelve foot walls of translucent mylar sheets. Rendered in malleable grays that create a sense of continuity, these almost transparent walls attract light and shelter the ball holder 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 in 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 the 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 ambience that was as 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

1.The French Baroque artist, Nicholas Poussin, also created models of 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.