solving for x
a collaborative work by artist Anne Lindberg and poet Ginny Threefoot
Carrie Secrist Gallery
Chicago, Illinois
installation photography by Nathan Kaey
drawing photography by Anne Lindberg
solving for x is the fourth collaboration between artist Anne Lindberg and poet Ginny Threefoot. Each of their projects offers the artists an opportunity to explore the indeterminacy of image and language. Lindberg and Threefoot resist making direct correlations between the visual and the verbal, examining alternative ways of understanding what arises when drawing and text coexist.
This collaboration takes its title from the directive in algebra to “solve for x.” By using letters to represent unknown values, algebraic equations allow mathematicians to express general relationships that hold true for every kind of magnitude and admit an infinite number of solutions. The word algebra itself is derived from the Arabic word jabara which means bone-setting, restoration, reunion. In solving for x, the horizontal lines of the drawing build atmosphere and the lines of poetry progress; color slips into language, and the words charge color with symbolic value. Alignments are suggested and “solutions” accumulate.
solving for x acknowledges the necessary existence of both the known and the unknown, the illuminated and the obscured, the coming-into-being and the disappearing. The poem presents a sequence of variables, and the drawing’s elements recede and emerge, allowing word and image to move toward resolution.
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Anne Lindberg: Over the last several years, I have found poetry to be a grounding influence on my work, often returning to the work of Alice Oswald, Tomas Tranströmer, Anne Carson, Rumi, Inger Christensen and Emily Dickinson. I selected contemporary poet Ginny Threefoot because we have an uncanny and intuitive relationship with one another’s work. We hold a shared interest in mystery and indeterminacy while rooting each of our works in the mutability and constancy of human life.
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Statement about the exhibition from Carrie Secrist Gallery:
Only Connect is inspired by a short epigraph found on the title page of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End as an essential reminder of the power of connection. In essence, this “connection” moves beyond the moral and social importance of the relationship between individuals and their backgrounds, and is something more private and essential: the personal and necessary value of connection and mutual understanding, regardless of time.
This is an exhibition about the connections artists forge, the conversations they have, and the ways in which they lift each other up. The show presents ten pairings of artists who have connected in variety of diverse ways that express a desire to inspire and be inspired by each other. Some of these connections include a shared studio practice, material consciousness, conceptual underpinnings, sense of community or ethos, explorations outside the visual arts and educational connections.
This curated grouping composed of artists involved with Carrie Secrist Gallery presently and over the years examines connections and art that were made primarily during the disconnected time of 2020. With each collaborative effort, gender plays a role in their creative process but is not the basis on which the work should be considered. Only Connect aspires to present an art world that feeds off of shared inspiration, dialogue and support for each other’s creative evolution.
