andante green
modal lines
2012
Nevada Museum of Art
Reno, Nevada
Curated by Ann Wolfe
Anne Lindberg makes delicate drawings and intricate installations from colored thread and graphite. Her works make subtle reference to ideas surrounding music, light, and art historical precedent. The title of this exhibition, modal lines, takes its name from early Western music — when compositions were based on modes, or patterns of notes known today as scales, which were composed on a series of parallel lines called a staff. Lindberg’s meditative works are studies in formal abstraction: dense in both color and repetition, they respond to, and resonate with their architectural surroundings in ways that complicate our perceptions of the objects themselves, as well as the spaces they inhabit.
After receiving a degree from Miami University in Ohio, Lindberg entered the fiber arts program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in 1988, and has since gravitated to the field of drawing. Her graphite drawings, made from thousands of parallel lines, vibrate and pulsate on paper. They might be compared to Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt’s minimalist line drawings of the late 1960s — albeit far more dense and filled with pulsating vibration. Lindberg’s room-sized installations, such as the one she constructed for this exhibition, are made from thousands of strands of fine thread stretched across and stapled to the walls. Viewers perceive a shifting color palette altered by light and shadow. Like her drawings, the installation itself appears to make subtle rhythmic movements. In her installations, Lindberg has “discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work also references physiological systems — such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium — and psychological states.”
