The expansive drawings of Anne Scheid hung scroll-like against the walls (though carefully mounted so as to float apart from them) or suspended in Doric serenity from the ceiling, impregnated with ink and charcoal and paint, multi-layered; always shifting, they appeared to have been conjured by hidden chthonic forces or wayward winds, an accumulation of actions more naiadic than human. It’s as if the demiurges, the water- sprites and the trees spirits, had awoken to recognize human interlopers partially excavated in the forms of decaying trees or spilling in cadence with the plunge of waters down the sheer façades of lambent paper.  Seen in this light, these drawings might suggest to the maenad audience dancing among the paper forest the incipient emergence of humanity amidst this woodland in which, until now, if a tree were to fall there would be no one yet to hear it, or alternately hear its demise; rather, these works ensure that thousands might be present to hear the whine of chain saws and to smell the detritus choking its once fecund streams and channels. Poised between paradise and post-human apocalypse, these drawings are never escapist, or falsely Arcadian, they are somehow too New Worldly for that.

Scheid is a long time Central Valley artist; titled ”Body/Land,” this 25-year retrospective curated by Gordon Fuglie, director of the Central California Museum of Art, was divided among three separate venues: the Fresno Art Museum (works from the years 2006-2012), Art Space Gallery at Fresno City College (2001 – 2005), and Arte Americas (1989 – 2000).

Scheid’s practice delivers unexpected meanings with traditional subjects, subtly subverting expectations to leave us grasping at traces, suggestions, echoes, evocations, and silences. Her evidently hands-on approach to fabrication, the scratching, pouring, scrubbing, dripping and basting are actually very hands-off, and this is critical to the revelations that her works induce. Despite the layering and veiling, there is no indication of a palimpsest here, nothing textual, yet the marks regularly seem almost to approach calligraphy. The inclusion of three vertical scrolls hanging from the center of the museums gallery’s ceiling– and thus viewable from front and back–silences any lingering doubts that the succession of layers might record a sequencing of the artist’s physical progress, because that very succession is reversed according to which side of the scroll one views, and ultimately tightly fused into an apparently singular stratum. This sense of compression, of flatness, of obliteration, and ultimately, of silence, chastens any lingering Dionysian undercurrents of the work, yielding a pensive inward absorption, oblivious to habitual contemporary cultural trends and preoccupations.

David Olivant
Art ltd. July/August 2016