10 / Charlotte Street Foundation, book celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Charlotte Street Foundation, includes an essay by Maria Elena Buszek about Anne Lindberg, 2007

Multimedia artist Anne Lindberg’s work is so diverse in its aesthetic, media, and processes as to defy easy description. It is, however, consistently driven by an obsession with observation. Whether using dance or music, art or light, birds or coffee grounds as her point of departure, Lindberg’s work is about – the artist, her subject, her audience – paying attention.

In earlier works such as of freckles (1999), Lindberg demonstrated the process of meditation and extraction that has since explored in myriad ways. In this piece, the artist dyed, dripped, and stitched abstract patterns derived from freckle cluster onto handmade paper with the translucency of skin, to striking effect. Subsequent work such as her breathing (2003) and bird cloud (2006) installations found the artist imitating similar flocking pattern in nature by “drawing” across walls with not only paint and graphite, but wires weighted with wood and the fine shadows that they cast. In all these, the artist’s desire to create works that are simultaneously “ephemeral and minimal, yet dense and manic” is realized with startling simplicity.

Even in works as disparate as old brain (2004) and democracy (2005) – both recently exhibited in the breathtaking Decelerate exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art – Lindberg further explores this contradictory goal. In the former, the artist compares the primitive strands of our sophisticated brain to a glittering pile of rayon sewing thread, six by thirty feet, tangled together like a massive mop or ponytail. In the latter, Lindberg transcribes a speech by natural history writer Terry Tempest Williams in hand-wrought strings of wire “text” that make manifest the author’s contention that too much conversation blurs and weighs down its potential for real meaning.

As Decelerate curator Elizabeth Dunbar wrote of such pieces, “Discipline in their form and methods of construction, yet hedonistic in their beauty an d amassing of materials, Lindberg’s objects are quiet, poetic, and visually arresting – often eliciting visceral responses.” And while the subjects, media and experience of all Lindberg’s work is tremendously different, each piece in its own way forces her audiences to slow down, investigate, and ponder its making and meaning on its own terms.

10 / Charlotte Street Foundation.pdf