cadence
Unmade: Anne Lindberg & Saskia Olde Wolbers
Center for Contemporary Art
Cincinnati, Ohio
Curated by Steven Matijcio
Statement by the Artist:
A language of contrasting materiality and color was the focus of the conceptual premise for cadence at the Contemporary Art Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. Here, I entered into a direct dialogue with the architecture of Zaha Hadid. The CAC is an inspiring dynamic building that seemed to ask me to act with pronouncement, and I found myself compelled to create a new modulation in my voice as an artist. Therefore, in a gallery space with few 90 degree angles and a series of progressively emerging columns, I suspended a glowing volume of warm yellow light that evades resolution and definition. This hovering immaterial cloud of color reached to 24 feet above the floor in Hadid's pop-up space at the far end of a long narrow exhibition space on the 2nd floor of the CAC.
In plan the pinched and expanded extrusion of thread found it's reference in the parallelogram language of the architecture, in part aligning with the architecture and in part diverging from it. Hadid's concrete building constantly shifts direction, compressing and opening space. The filament strands of thread partially wrap around one of the cast concrete columns before they rush toward the opposing walls. Is the rough knife-edge of the concrete column pushing against the delicate thread, or is the mass of thread re-positioning the column?
Curator Steven Matjicio text:
Acts of making and meaning are often interwoven, such that a product of human hands can easily become trapped by a singular definition. The CAC building is the physical realization of Zaha Hadid's philosophy, with every wall, line, texture and materials speaking her pronounced vision of contemporary art. Yes as this space surpasses its 11th anniversary and the organization enters its 75th year, the onset of familiarity, convention and habit compels one to move in the opposite direction. What is achieved when, with equal urgency and resolve, the course is reversed and purpose is unmade?
Arists Anne Lindberg and Saskia Olde Wolbers dissolve the comforts and complacency that accumulate in spaces that time solidifies. Lindberg pushes drawing on and off the page, obsessively inscribing lines that evade both resolution and definition. Instead she allows her nomadic constellation to hover and near without every touching - convening clouds that vibrate with the unseen rhythms of our body inner workings. Dutch-born, London-base Wolbers orchestrates a cinematic enterprise with equally enigmatic vigor. By submerging handmade sets into water and coating narratives to masquerade as reality, she melts the seemingly digital polish of her films with painterly contingency. Wolbers' amorphous engineering also highlights the intricate architecture of Lindberg's drawings, at the same time Lindberg's threaded color fields reflect the manual DNA of Wolbers' moving images. Their ensuing dialogue softens the geometry of the gallery space, obscuring hard lines and sharp corners to float towards a mysterious horizon.
