UP EAST, DOWN HOME

BY D. ERIC BOOKHARDT

WHAT: Lesley Dill: Poem Sculptures

WHEN: Through May

WHERE: Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St., 522-1999

Lesley Dill’s Radiance illustrates her fondness for mantra meditation in which words are repeated, for different words keep showing up on repeated viewings.

For her 40th birthday, Lesley Dill’s mother gave her a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It changed her life. A New Englander raised in Maine, Dill could relate to the Amherst, Mass., laureate’s quirky syntax, her way of lurching from one thought to another in phrases that might seem disjointed were they not so fraught with intimations of revelation. For Dill it was personal; her father was a schizophrenic with his own way of using language, or as she put it: “I grew up in a psychically bilingual family never knowing when a word would contain another meaning.”

Lesley Dill’s Radiance illustrates her fondness for mantra meditation in which words are repeated, for different words keep showing up on repeated viewings.

Given to visions early on, she took up mantra meditation in which words or phrases are

Lesley Dill's Radiance illustrates her fondness for mantra meditation in which words are repeated, for different words keep showing up on repeated viewings.

repeated, and spent time in India and Nepal, fascinated by their vivid languages and art forms — traces of which, along with fragments of Emily Dickinson, appear in her work. Her new show builds on those themes. Blue Frida, a wall sculpture, suggests outlines of a figure on a bench. Cobbled from cut and stitched blue fabric, its surface displays barely legible block letters in black ink: “You cannot fold a flood.” If this sounds like poetic dissociation, it is, in fact, from Dickinson’s “You Cannot Put a Fire Out.” (“You cannot fold a flood/And put it in a drawer/Because the winds would find it out/And tell your cedar floor.”)

Radiance is a frontal silhouette of a head and shoulders made from pale-colored felt cut in the shape of letters. Look closely and the letters, jumbled on top of each other, spell out the word “Radiance.” Look again, and other words seem to emerge, such as “Danger” or “Dancer.” (Metaphors for ecstasy?) In Still, a very large, 9-by-30-foot piece, words high on the wall trail long streamers like horse tails. One line reads, “I still half believed that a word could save me,” which sounds almost generic. Another line, “Faith, like a guillotine, as heavy as light,” resonates Dickinsonian sensibilities, but it’s actually from Franz Kafka. Apparently, Dill wants us to take nothing for granted. But that may also be said of the show as a whole, which, if less dramatic than some of her previous productions, is still representative of this thoughtful artist’s oeuvre.