cycles of seeing
Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center
Garrison, New York
May - October 2020
The Artist Residency program was initiated in 2014 to foster creative responses to Manitoga that invoke Russel Wright's legacy of creative experimentation and celebration of place. Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center is pleased to announce year seven with presentations of work by New York based artist Anne Lindberg and British composer Pete M. Wyer. Anne Lindberg’s luminous large-scale drawings cycles of seeing will be installed in the main House. Both works find inspiration in and community with nature at Manitoga as Russel Wright did from the moment he took stewardship of this sacred land.
At Manitoga, Wright was keenly aware of the seasonal cycle and rhythms of nature, of the daily and often barely perceptible changes in color and light in the landscape and within the house. Nature was the inspiration for Manitoga’s design, and it framed the rituals of every day life here as woodland footpaths followed the arc of the sun and the home’s furnishings and wall panels changed with the turn of season.
In her two-part drawing series cycles of seeing, Lindberg’s palette of thousands of colored parallel lines will transition from cool to warm as summer becomes fall at Manitoga, reflecting concerns of time, sequence and causality. Lindberg’s works unfold at the pace of her step as she pulls lines across a pliant mat board, and she finds context for her work within a long tradition of other “walking artists” including William Wordsworth, Rebecca Solnit, and Virginia Woolf. “Like these artists, philosophers and writers, I use walking as time to encourage a fluid state of perceptions, to contemplate place, and to affect change and adaptation as it informs incremental, moment-to-moment decisions in the making of my work.”
To Lindberg’s list of walking artists, we might add Russel Wright who routinely walked his seventy-five acres of woodlands over many years, observing, mapping and refining Manitoga’s footpaths and trails and placing his house and studio as part of a mindful and orchestrated movement through and dialogue with nature. Lindberg’s deliberate and measured pace informs the scale of her work as Wright’s was the measure of Manitoga.
