Benjamin Genocchioã¢â‚¬â„¢s Review for the New York Times Leslie Dill
Art Review
Mixed (Media) Messages
"Tremendous Earth" is the apt title of Lesley Dill's exhibition now at the Neuberger Museum of Fine art, where extremely large, dramatic works cover the walls of the gallery, some of them up to sixty feet long and 20 anxiety high. The show is not a retrospective, but it does relate ideas and themes that the Brooklyn-based, Bronxville-born creative person has been working with throughout her career.
Ms. Dill, 57, has long been fascinated by the visual qualities and symbolic power of language. In this exhibition she premieres 4 new large-scale, site-specific installations based on what she describes in an interview in the itemize as "the archeology of language, image and surface." The works reference texts by Kafka, Emily Dickinson and the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu.
Accompanying the show is a 52-infinitesimal documentary video most Ms. Dill. It is worth watching, for she speaks candidly about her core inspiration — her parents, both teachers, who instilled in her a honey of words, literature and poesy, in particular the poems of Dickinson. Later she spent some fourth dimension in India, where she became attuned to the colors, tactility and directness of South Asian temple sculpture. She also became engrossed in eastern mysticism, music, yoga and meditation.
Y'all'll find all of these influences and more than in Ms. Dill'south installations at the Neuberger show, which become across a simple visual experience to become a kind of performance. In improver to making the artworks especially for the space, she has arranged them in such a way as to nowadays viewers with something similar to a cinematic experience. To enter this exhibition is to step into an imaginary, sometimes winsomely mad fantasy earth.
"Rush" (2006-2007) is i of the nearly visually appealing and ambitious works. It is a lx-foot-long, twenty-foot-high collage of hundreds of interconnected animal and human figures, culled from world spiritual traditions and representing meditation, death, love, transcendence and other themes. The figures were cut with a knife from filmy sheets of black foil, backed with organza, then woven together with wire. They coalesce to create a giant thought cloud issuing from a six-inch seated, meditating effigy.
The seated figure, a heroic, classical male nude in sober meditation, suggests Auguste Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker." But Ms. Dill's piece has a darker, more sorrowful mental landscape to explore. Running across the top of the collage are letters spelling out a quotation translated from Kafka's diaries that gave the exhibition its title: "The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and gratuitous it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather exist torn to pieces than retain it in me or coffin it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me."
Visionary power, nuance and heartfelt sincerity are the currency in which Ms. Dill trades, which is no existent surprise given her enthusiasm for verse. Her art evokes an imaginative and emotional space, deftly balancing certain, concrete reference points with whimsical intimations of some other, larger, escapist universe. You either accept information technology all on organized religion and requite yourself over to the artist and her piece of work, or support and walk correct out.
Language equally a catalyst for ideas virtually life, death, and the afterlife underpins two other major works here, "Ascent" (2005-2006) and "Shimmer" (2005-2006). "Rise" consists of a lacquered red fabric sculpture of a seated female figure with xi banners of mitt-dyed carmine silk rise upwardly from her dorsum and onto the wall. It seems to be a female person version of "Rush," though it takes its inspiration from accounts of visionary experiences that Ms. Dill collected in 2000 in Winston-Salem, N.C., while on an artist residency. The accounts are by members of a local Baptist Church.
The third wall is occupied by "Shimmer," an immense curtain of fine, silvery metallic wire, initially inspired by the play of low-cal on the Atlantic Sea. To this the creative person has appended a line fatigued from one of Mr. Espriu's poems, spelled out in handmade wire letters along the top and bottom of the wire curtain. The quotation captures a kind of melancholic glee that accords with the artist's existential bent: "Y'all may express mirth simply I experience within me suddenly strange voices of God / and handles canis familiaris's thirst and bulletin of slow memories that disappear across a fragile bridge."
The fourth and concluding part of the exhibition is a wall of foil-cutout allegorical figures in costumes. They evoke a human presence, possibly suggesting visitors to the evidence contemplating the artist's work. Only as e'er the exact meaning is unclear. Ms. Dill's sculptures are less visual objects for discrete aesthetic contemplation than knotty philosophical puzzles that use sculpture every bit a launching pad.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20artswe.html
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