Lesley Dill - Wilderness: Light Sizzle Around Me
Mortin Gallery and Don Russell Clayton Gallery
March 14 – May 14, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 16, 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Opening Reception
Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than
a decade in the making. The exhibition represents Dill’s ongoing investigation into
the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For Dill, the “American” voice
grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness
“out there” and the wilderness inside us. The extremes of both shaped history and
gave pulse and heat to the words of activists like John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Mother
Ann Lee, and Dred Scott. Dill writes, “These personas and their times stir something
deep in my own family history and sense of self. I am compelled to this restrictive
time-period of limited access to a diversity of written word, and the bravery of these
figures’ response.” The book Lesley Dill: Wilderness, Light Sizzles Around Me by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich is available in conjunction with the exhibition and
features essays by Nancy Princenthal, Andrew Wallace and others. This exhibition is
organized by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa.
Lesley Dill has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of
many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern
Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017 she was named a fellow
of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In 2018
the opera was re-staged in New York City and captured in an award-winning film by
Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 ‘Tell it Slant’
Award. In her work, Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson,
Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into
works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music—works that awaken the viewer
to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, organized by the Figge Art Museum, is currently traveling to 7 venues through Winter
of 2023. The exhibition amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle
with divinity, deviltry, and freedom, including Mother Ann Lee, Black Hawk, Sojourner
Truth, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Horace Pippin, and Sister Gertrude Morgan. Dill
is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New
Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This exhibition is Organized
by the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, and was made possible by Humanities Iowa
and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Credit: Lesley Dill, Emily Dickinson and the Voices of her Time, 2016, Oil stick, hand-cut paper, and thread on fabric-backed acrylic painted paper.
