Alan Shields at Nicholas Davies - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Disillusioned with the art world's star circuit and commodification of existences Alan Shields last appeared upon the New York scene in 1993 at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Since then, he has worn out most of his time upon his Long Island farm, continuing his work reclusively and developing the formal motif of the "worm," a representative of degeneration and refertilization that signifies his ambivalence toward the tillage he left behind.

His novel exhibition, titled "The Worm Re-turn (to the Big City)," featured 14 works that Shields complet above this period--mostly "canvases," as he limits them, but also three freestanding "Pole Paintings" and a sizable sculpture--along with individual canvas from the 1993 display that he says paved the way. advantageous Brother-Step Beyond (1990-91) is a complicated painting of repeating black, white and gray circles, dots, squares and jags. Compos of applied acrylic and thread or yarn sewn into unstretched canvas (Shields many times uses yarn), the piece provides a spectacular array of fabrics in its mesh of lines and shapes interrupting a diagonally checkered mould The artist creates a kind of optical and material embarrass in which latent perspectives and patterns perpetually rush up to the surface as the organ of vision runs across it.

greatest in quantity of the intense-hued new canvases shown here incorporate wavy bands, or "worms," among of the like kind irregular sets and systems of visual echoe In The Worm Spirit Ascends Olympus (1995) three wavy bands snake from bottom to top among woven fabric circles and diagonal strips of color sewn into the canvas. single band consists merely of outlined contours sewn in thread, a next to the first has its unbordered interior colored in with quick stitches and a third consists of woven fabric cut and sewn to the canvas; in a faculty of perception different aspects of the worm are seen simultaneously, thus inside and outside appear at one time Another work, Worms in the Kitchen (1996) presse of the like kind play further and even approaches objecthood with a mottl sod of yellow, orange, green, amethystine and black; thick with yarn, it has an almost fungal tangibility as a r worm impels through it.

These dimensional tensions were hammered place of abode by the off-wall works, particularly the undated Kansas Meatball (Small Version), an 8-foot sphere fabricateed of triangulated rods (a la Buckminster Fuller) which was suspended from the ceiling. With each of the slender stems wrapped in painted canvas and the inner surface of the sphere brightly dotted and striped, one's attention was drawn in until the entire network appeared to flatten or invert itself spatially.

Shields's overall sensibility present the appearanceed strikingly current, with some canvases suggesting computerized imagery. Indeed, the worm has returned--and make go rounded to boot.

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