SHATTERED SILK: New Works by Anne Strand
March 6–31, 2018
with an artist reception Thursday, March 8, 5–8 pm
Anne Strand will exhibit new mixed media collages/paintings on canvas and mixed media collages/paintings on vintage patchwork quilts this March at Southside Gallery. Strand describes the exhibition, titled Shattered Silk, as a tribute to “icons of the feminine visage,” which “symbolize the artistry of the feminine eye as set forth in quilt form over the ages.”
THE QUILT
A quilt made by her great-grandmother, which won first prize at the 1901 Tri-State Fair, inspired Strand’s new body of work. A silk quilt, made by her grandmother for her mother, was also an inspiration for Shattered Silk. The silk quilt hangs in her studio. She describes both quilts as “subtle and beautiful works of art” and writes that although quilting wasn’t considered fine art at the time the quilts were constructed, that the women who made them “were certainly artists.”
Strand began her new series of work by collecting “pre-1930 quilts and quilt fragments that were deteriorating.” A collage artist and painter, Strand did no additional sewing or stitching to the vintage quilts or quilt fragments herself. Instead, she collaged the fragments onto canvases and painted and collaged directly on the hanging quilts. The mixed-media works include materials such as Chinese spirit paper, paint, twentieth-century weavings and “eye like vintage or antique buttons.”
Shattered Silk marks a major evolution in Strand’s work. Strand, best known for her meditative abstract paintings, has not only begun to explore new media, but a new narrative has emerged in her work as well. The meditative quality of Strand’s past work carries over to the collages featured in Shattered Silk, but she also addresses feminism—a timely social and political topic to say the least—and the oppression of silence women often endure. Strand writes in her artist’s statement, “This exhibition celebrates the quilt, with all its complex layering and beautiful patterning, as a metaphor for creation—a visual blueprint unconsciously reminding us of the greater design. Feminine forms and faces collected from different sources, ages, races, and places are reproduced onto rag paper, lacquered and forged into the bodies of the individual works. By focusing on eyes with mouths separate or absent, Strand echoes the silence that often followed what was seen or experienced by women throughout the ages. These silenced faces underscore the theme by inviting the viewer to look beyond for rebirth beneath the brokenness or neglect.”
Anne Strand is an Episcopal Chaplain and retired psychotherapist. She formerly lived in Oxford, Mississippi, but now lives in Selma, Alabama. Strand studied art in Paris with abstract expressionist Elaine de Kooning, wife of twentieth-century art icon, Willem de Kooning. She holds degrees in art, theology, and psychology, and also attended the New York Studio School. Her art has been exhibited in a number of galleries and belongs to many private and corporate collections. Her art has also been featured in a one-woman retrospective at the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts, Columbus, Georgia. This is Strand’s fourth exhibition at Southside Gallery.
