a new light
solo exhibition
The Landing
5118 West Jefferson Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90016
July 11 - August 21, 2021
The Landing is pleased to present a new light, a solo exhibition of new works by Upstate New York-based multimedia artist Anne Lindberg. The show includes a forty-foot-wide thread-based installation and ten drawings and is the artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast.
The exhibition takes its name from the installed work “a new light” (2021), made of thousands of threads that span the gallery from wall to wall, evoking a pillar of light transiting the gallery horizontally, as if the sun’s energy could run as a circuit wall to wall, paused and observable.
The work itself is a record of the walking required in its creation. To install the piece, Lindberg moves across the gallery again and again, threading and affixing, and the long, repetitive, meditative process of that movement is palpable in the finished work—which carries the feeling of a stillness built of slow, regular movement.
The gallery’s architecture is central to the experience of the installation. Positioned below the gallery’s several skylights, the thread work creates lineated shadows that move throughout the day in relation to the sun. This slow but ever-mobile shadow-transit mirrors the bodies movements used in building the installation. As clouds pass over the gallery, optical dynamics appear and disappear, doubling and undoubling upon themselves to create a constantly changing sequence of phenomena. This immersive lineation is a hovering buoyant drawing with thread in air - considered and experienced with the body.
In 2018, Lindberg had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City where she presented another sun-evoking thread-based piece, “the eye’s level.” Lindberg showed another such work, “the long sun,” at Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) Raleigh. So, “a new light” (2021) is the latest in a series of light-shard explorations by Lindberg. It is the first of Lindberg’s works to follow the pandemic’s quarantine, and the first, therefore, to evoke the question: how is our experience of light changed by its absence, and then its return?
The consideration of light by way of straight lines continues in the ten drawings that complete the exhibition. Throughout the drawings, color comes and goes, moving in and out of prominence like a kind of weather. This movement mirrors the emergence and disappearance of the changes in chroma within the installed thread work as clouds move over the gallery.
Lindberg’s drawings are built of tightly composed, subtly shifting lines in graphite and colored pencil that are oriented horizontally or vertically across white mat board. Using an extruded gesture, Lindberg varies pressure and speed, as well as the tilt and posture of her hand, to create each of the thousands of lines in her drawings. The sharpness and dullness of the pencil lead and the line-by-line choice of color establishes an ever-present gradient of lights and darks. Mixes of colors, from subtle to electric, are inserted into this field suggesting protean states of mind and a visual acknowledgement of the constancy of change.
In the drawing “flash: verdant” (2020), a pale field of vertical lines appears along the left side where it is met suddenly by a flash of vivid color – oranges and greens – that resolves into blues and blacks as the eye journeys to the right edge of the drawing. The darkening and condensing atmosphere is subtle, nearly imperceptible, when viewed up close, yet dramatic when viewed from several paces away.
Each line in Lindberg’s drawings ends at a slightly different place, creating an organic edge that presents each line as a singular element carefully laid into position within the matrix. While the straightness of the lines implies the use of a ruler, the free expression at either end gives prominence to the maker’s hand—just as the thread-based installation is an indexical register of the maker’s project of installing her work.
A new series of drawings called “roots of how we measure” take a new turn. Sequences of lines gain momentum and then subside, with color acting a catalyst that heightens the language of surprise, interruption, and contrast. In “root of how we measure 06,” a tilting black bar of acrylic paint partially obscures a brilliant fluorescent wedge of orange. Whereas earlier drawings reflect the physical passage of the body within its environment, the pronounced shifts and tilts within “roots of how we measure” articulate an internal psychological restlessness, and in so doing, ground us in a quieter space.
All of Lindberg’s drawings carry an emotional weight within an overall atmosphere of ethereality. The drawings seem to be asking us to attend to both the internal and the external challenges of our time. It seems only natural that works made in 2020 and 2021, during a pandemic, explore repetition, pattern, the paced and regular walking of lines, transitions in and out of density, and the experience of light’s brilliance after the palpable heaviness of its absence.
all photographs by Joshua White Photography
