By Rick Allen via ocala.com
Registrar David Reutter, left, and Paul Arthur, chief preparatory, hang Lesley Dill’s “Kill The Calm” at the Appleton Museum of Art. Photo credit: Doug Engle/Staff photographer.
In the eons since written language was developed, its art typically was words: poetry, essays, plays and so forth.
But they were always arranged in lines and columns or sometimes blocks.
Images evoked were in the imagination of the listener or reader, and rarely the same from one person to another.
Then, a little more than a hundred years ago, French poet Stephane Mallarme unveiled a typographical form of poetry that would be called “concrete poetry” — described by the New World Encyclopedia as “poetry that relies as much on its appearance on the page as the sound of its words.”
Now there’s Lesley Dill, a Brooklyn, New York-based artist who creates mesmerizing images using words and their letters.
“She uses words as her brush strokes,” said Ruth Grim, curator of exhibits at the Appleton Museum of Art, where this Saturday Dill’s “Faith & the Devil” touring exhibit opens for a run through March 22.
“Nobody else really does this like her,” Grim said while standing in the Edith-Marie Appleton gallery among towering tapestry-size works that are the bulk of this exhibit. “There are other artists who work like this, but she’s really elevated it.”
In a corner, almost insignificant, is a child-like, child-size mannequin.
“That’s Lucifer,” she said. “He’s a little pipsqueak, that nasty little thing you don’t think can matter much at all.”
Yet, a pair of works on the wall beside him graphically depict amorality of animals and the downright evil of man in the form of dismemberment of children in the Sudan, documented by Dill’s digital-journalist husband, Ed Robbins, several years ago.
The flow of the exhibits examines the internal struggle between good and evil, beginning with the struggle and finally climaxing with the relief of overcoming it — if only for now — in the form of Big Gal Faith, the room-size centerpiece of the exhibit.
Yet even Gal has a formidable look about her.
The swirl of words throughout can be both compelling and repulsing.
“I think of the words as if you’re walking into a book,” Dill said. “I don’t expect everyone to read them; you kind of have to decipher them.”
Speaking by telephone from her studio in New York, she said a part of the inspiration for this work stemmed from a vision she had when she was 14.
“It gave me an experience of the polarities of luminosity and dark illumination,” she said. “I saw darkness shot through with threads of light, and I felt and saw and heard the words ‘pestilence’ and ‘ravaging,’ and I saw war and murder in a kind of murky way.”
“Yet, while I was absorbing the horror of that, I felt a complete sense of rapture and bliss, an enormous sense of understanding,” she added. “I was given to understand the world.”
The poetry of Emily Dickinson empowered her to give form to the images.
“She’s so well known for being a fragile woman, but her words are incredibly powerful and wide-ranging,” Dill said. “They gave me a kind of permission to go to darkness, go to lightness, to go to transcendence and to engage with evil.”
Yet, she considers herself something of a storyteller.
“I’m so interested in storytelling,” she said. “And I’m so taken by language, but poetry — especially Emily Dickinson’s — really woke me up to the poetic and metaphysical nature of language.”
Dickinson’s words, along with other great writers of the ages, can be found amid the images on the linen canvases on the gallery walls.
But there’s not the hangup of organized religion — and then there’s that word, “faith.”
Dill said “faith” is an “intense word. People have so many different reactions to that word. A lot of people think of it as an old-fashioned, dogmatic, religious word that we’ve moved beyond.”
“I think of it as a word that encompasses not only good, but encompasses evil, madness, cruelty,” she said.
In an artist’s statement on her website, Dill wrote that “ ‘Faith & the Devil’ is a walk through a person’s mind — encompassing a world in which unfathomable actions of dismemberment and cruelty co-exist with times of reflection and illumination.
“I believe the soul is huge, hungry and ravenous, and faith contains as much fear as optimism and crazy grace.”
Scott Olsen, a professor of philosophy and comparative religions at the College of Central Florida, will be joining Dill in an open conversation about the exhibit.
In the meantime, he’s getting familiar with the work.
“You certainly get your good versus evil, the whole struggle of having faith,” he said, “having religion’s beautiful, presumably loving and kind expressions of humanity that also simultaneously turn out to be some of the most evil sources of persecution of others.
“On the [one] hand, you’ve got what she calls the cruelty and violence and lust, and then you’ve got the forgiveness, self-reflection and maybe transcendence on the other hand,” Olsen added. “It’s an existential and philosophical juxtaposition of these concepts of good and evil, right and wrong.”
The exhibit, created in 2012, took a year and a half to complete, Dill said. It’s been touring for two years.
“I just want people to be affected,” she added, “to open up their lives, their experiences to luminosity, to their reaction to what just happened in Paris, to all the things that happen today.”