Diptychs - Inspired by the Reynolda House Collection
2011. Artworks Gallery, Winston-Salem, NC.
In this exhibition iconic paintings from Reynolda House Museum of American Art meet their contemporary counterparts from the worlds of advertising, pop culture and current events. The show consists of a dozen pairs of photocopied images applied directly to gallery walls. Jeremiah Theus’s stiff 18th-century portrait of a proper matron is set beside a photo of an aggressively sexualized hibiscus bloom. Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch,” a 19th-century vision of man and nature in harmony, is offset by a photograph of the polar bear, a species now endangered by global warming. A weathered and sullen Iggy Pop is paired with Thomas Eakins’ 1905 portrait of a red-eyed and sallow-faced Pennsylvania businessman. Through visual repetition and irony Shields shows us that nothing is truly new, not even the things that shock us today.
In this exhibition iconic paintings from Reynolda House Museum of American Art meet their contemporary counterparts from the worlds of advertising, pop culture and current events. The show consists of a dozen pairs of photocopied images applied directly to gallery walls. Jeremiah Theus’s stiff 18th-century portrait of a proper matron is set beside a photo of an aggressively sexualized hibiscus bloom. Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch,” a 19th-century vision of man and nature in harmony, is offset by a photograph of the polar bear, a species now endangered by global warming. A weathered and sullen Iggy Pop is paired with Thomas Eakins’ 1905 portrait of a red-eyed and sallow-faced Pennsylvania businessman. Through visual repetition and irony Shields shows us that nothing is truly new, not even the things that shock us today.