Between Dispersal & Recovery
November 18, 2023 – January 6, 2024
Rusha & Co. presents Sienna Shields: Between Dispersal & Recovery, the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery.
"For the person seeking, even if he is well aware that there is no path to guide him, the world around him will be inhabited by signs. The least object, the most ephemeral creature, because of the good they do him, will arouse the hope of an absolute good.
In the true place, elementary realities reveal that they are not confined to place and moment, that they partake less of the nature of being than that of language, that they can compel whatever appears beside them to speak to us, in a whisper, of an unforeseeable future.
I have discovered the point at which, by the grace of the future, reality and language have united their powers. And I say that a longing for the true place is the vow made by poetry.
Having conferred the energy to undertake the journey, poetry provides the path. Words appearing before us in the space of our waiting, words being only a matter of waiting and knowing, poetry will know how to dissociate, at the most important moments, quality that is ephemeral from meaning that is vigilant.
It will search the horizon according to the wish of our hearts. It will question all that pass by.
And when certain things reveal themselves to be openings, poetry will keep these keys in mind in its strictest economy; it will establish the word ‘lamp’ or ‘ship’ or ‘shore’ in the stronghold of a memory that is striving between dispersal and recovery.
The poet is the person who ‘burns’ with expectation. Poetry brings about the transformation of the finished into the possible, of the remembered into the expected, of the wasteland into a journey, into hope.
This poetry will prove to have been our destiny. For in the meantime we shall have grown older. The act of speech will have taken place in the same space of time as our other actions. It will have given us one kind of life rather than another.
I think of that poet whose hope was the clearest, whose suffering was the keenest. Purely, like poetry incarnate, he became totally absorbed in the hopeless love that is love for mortal beings. But his desire remained desire, and his impulse toward plenitude maintained, in the honesty of his heart, the sense of what cannot be possessed.
This union of lucidity and hope is what I call melancholy. And in the world of Justice, nothing comes closer to Grace—whether truth or beauty—than this ardent melancholy."
- Yves Bonnefoy
Alaska based artist, Sienna Shields, studied history at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and works in paint, collage, quilting, performance, and multiple media including video. While at school, she became interested in vintage fire-insurance maps in which, as buildings and lots were altered, new images of modified constructions and street schemes were layered on top of existing maps to save on costs for the municipality. Archival collages are the root of Shields’ imposing works with their shimmering collaged surfaces of paper painted with acrylics and oils. The technique involves glazing bits of paper with various types of pigments and treating them as froissage elements—crumpling them up and overlaying randomly splattered paint onto the wrinkled forms.
Shields was the chief organizer of the HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? artist collective and the director of its digital work. Shields’s work has been exhibited at the Kruger Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; Superfront Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Kuma-Galerie, Berlin, Germany; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Sienna Shields
The Tone-Scientists 14, 2023
acrylic, painted paper on canvas
60 x 48 in.
152.4 x 121.92 cm
