Lesley Dill: Wild Grace This Private Hallucinatory Moment

The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Lesley Dill: Wild Grace – This Private Hallucinatory Moment, an exhibition of hand-cut copper and text works by Lesley Dill. 

Each day in Lesley Dill’s Brooklyn Heights studio begins and ends with poetry. Surrounded by a small team of interns, she opens a well-worn edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected works, reading a random poem aloud, line by line, to begin the day’s work. Throughout the day, her team collaborates on her ongoing project, This Private Hallucinatory Moment, selecting fragments of Dickinson’s poetry to stencil and sew onto organza-backed copper cutouts, which Dill calls her Electric Ladies. The day closes as it began: with poetry, often an original verse by an intern or a translation of Dickinson into another language, such as Finnish, Mandarin, Spanish, and others.

This daily ritual of language and making fuels Dill’s newest body of work, created during and after her 2023–2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship on outsider artists and late-19th-century scientific discovery. Inspired by early experiments with electricity, magnetism, and X-rays, Dill explores what she calls “the overlap between art and science—discovery and adventure.” Her experimental process extends even to chemistry: she and her studio assistants have used salt, liver of sulfur, and other materials to create shifting patinas and iridescence on copper sheets, often working from her apartment fire escape.

At the heart of the exhibition is an expansive new wall piece, measuring 13 feet by 26 feet, designed specifically for the Arthur Roger Gallery. The work presents a host of fiery, fervent figures inspired by Indigenous healers, outsider artists, and both real and imagined scientists. As Dill describes them, these “electric ladies” seem to rise, charged with language and light, out of a vintage typewriter central to the installation. Flanking the main wall are individually presented figures. 

“Wild Grace – This Private Hallucinatory Moment is a work of hidden glory,” Dill says. “It’s about rising up—through poetry, through art, through discovery.”