UH multimedia show strives for visual conversations
By VIctoria Gail-White
Advertiser art critic
"A thought went up my mind to-day/That I have had before
But did not finish, — some way back, /I could not fix the year,
Now where it went, nor why it came/The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was, /Have I the art to say.
But somewhere in my soul, I know/I've met the thing before;
It just reminded me —'twas all — /And came my way no more — "
These words of poet Emily Dickinson (1830-86) are inscribed on the back of a woman in an almost life-size, black-and-white photograph titled "A Thought Went Up My Mind Today" (1996), by Lesley Dill, part of a retrospective of Dill's work at The Contemporary Museum.
Born in 1950 in New York and raised in Maine, Dill graduated with a degree in English literature and later received a master's degree in art education before she realized she wasn't a writer and didn't want to be a teacher.
For her 40th birthday, Dill's mother gave her a copy of "The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson."
"I started reading that language, and instantly images rose up," she said at a recent docent and media walk-through at museum. "It's as if it started little fires in my body. I opened the book, and I burst into flames."
For the past 10 years, the flames of Dill's imagination have taken shape through her paintings, printmaking, sculpture, photography and performance art.
She, like Dickinson, is a prolific artist. As Dickinson brought domesticity into the high art of poetry, Dill likes to work with common materials such as cloth, tea, wire and hair. And not surprisingly, they share a love of language.
"I view myself as an artist who uses language," said Dill. "Our language comes from inside us. It is a very personal, intimate thing. I take a breath and I wrap that language with my breath and I bring it out from my heart, lungs, throat, teeth, and my mouth up out into the air, onto your skin and into your ears and into your body. The deepest part of your body is actually going out into the world into somebody else's body."
After being poetically monogamous for seven years, Dill has branched out into using the poetry and words of other writers such as Rilke, Espriu and Kafka.
Language is stamped onto cloth ("Visionary," 1995); painted onto bodies and photographed ("A Thought Went Up My Mind Today," 1996); formed with twisted and connected wires ("Wire Wall of Words," 1995); cut out of copper sheets ("Copper Poem Hands," 1994); stamped on leaves of paper ("Voice," 2002); and sewn with horse hair on a rice paper, tea-stained dress ("Poem Hair Dress," 1993).
It is important to note that, although her work contains common elements, it is not ordinary. There is fierceness in her constructions. "Punch" (1998) is a bronze head sculpture punched by a bronze hand connected to a long arm of cloth (which also looks like a tongue) imprinted with the words "How Ruthless are the Gentle."
In this 10-year survey of Dill's work, there is reverence and liberation. The words and language serve as metaphors that bridge into a transcendent state. The paradoxical elements of fullness and loss, vulnerability and strength, softness and intensity are threads Dill stitches into her work and invisibly attaches to the viewer.
Of the predominantly black, white and tea-stained colors of the exhibit, Dill said, "I like to get to the bone, the nerves, the blood of what our lives are about and it seems to me that black and white can open us up more to myth. As a viewer, you can project your own oration. I grew up reading black letters against a white page. We are all words against a page. We do read each other. We do find out about each other."
In "Visionary" (1995), Dickinson's words —
"The thrill came slowly like a boon/ For Centuries delayed —
Its fitness growing like the flood/ In Sumptuous solitude —
The desolation only missed/ While rapture changed its dress
And stood amazed before the change/ In ravished holiness — "
— are printed below a large photographic silk-screened image of a woman in a simple white dress surrounded by a ground of black on a long, tea-stained piece of muslin. For this and other works she calls "tapestries," Dill used 30,000 tea bags and stained each piece seven times.
The project changed her mind about drinking hot tea as a beverage.
"It seems like an art material to me," she said.
A year spent living in India transformed Dill's life in many ways.
She gave herself up to "the melodic song of the language," she said, "and felt relieved of the responsibility of knowing what the words meant."
She saw fluttering prayer flags carrying invisible words in the air. Language was formed by words but unencumbered by their meaning.
"In my work, I try to have words that you can read and words that you can't read," said Dill. "You'll see it as untranslated language. One word could mean four or five different things."
When Dill left India, her friends painted her hands with henna, the celebratory practice called mendhi. The design lasted for weeks.
"I felt it was a wonderful metaphor for language, continually staining from the inside of your body through the outside," she said.
In "Untitled" (1997) the words of Dickinson — "We like a Hairbreadth 'scape/It tingles the Mind/Far after Act or Accident/Like paragraphs of Wind" — are painted on a man's body and then photographed. The silver gelatin print is then scratched, cut and scraped on the surface, representing for Dill "that kind of internal language tattoo on the figure."
Hung on a hanger, a loosely constructed wire-and-thread long-sleeved dress, titled "Dress of Nerves II" (1995), has words of wire running down the inside that read, "Exhilaration is within."
"It is about pulling your nervous system up out of your body," said Dill. Something we can all relate to this time of year.
In 1998, Dill made "Public Editions" on billboards in the Tampa Bay area. These billboards contained painted images and fragments of poetry and were aimed to sell emotion as a novel and thought-provoking experience to jaded motorists.
Enticed by visionary and spiritual experiences (her own and others), the alchemy of language and the depths of private and public words Dill's works "Vision Catcher" (1995) and "Poem Eyes" (1995) share the same words, "These — saw visions — latch them softly."
In keeping with that concept, Dill recently created two community-project performance videos, "Tongues on Fire" (2001) with the Spiritual Choir of North Carolina, and "Interviews with the Contemplative Mind" (2002).
"I feel that as the body is hungry, so is the soul," she said.
Three of her earlier performance videos can be viewed at the exhibit, as well.
"Voice" (2002) is the most recent work in the exhibit. A lower torso hung upside down spills from its mid-section stitched-together leaves printed with the words "bone voice" and "blood voice."
"My feeling is that if you were to cut us open," said Dill, "instead of our pancreas, intestines and liver falling out, what would really fall out would be words. The words that actually meet air in our lifetime are few compared to the untongued and unlipped words."
Dill's artwork is engaging and exhilarating. And looking at her bio one notes that she is also well-received, having shown her work in major museums and galleries.
Maybe viewing this exhibit is best described with a poem by Emily Dickinson, (but be sure to read this next to a fire extinguisher):
"EXHILARATION is the Breeze/That lifts us from the ground,
And leaves us in another place/Whose statement is not found;
Returns us not, but after time/We soberly descend,
A little newer for the term/Upon enchanted ground."
If you are interested in refreshing your memory of Emily Dickinson's poetry and learning more about Lesley Dill, there is an abundance of information available on the Internet through a Google search. There also is a catalog of the exhibit for sale in the gift shop at the museum.
