Press & Media

“Lesley Dill: E is for Ecstasy,” A Blade of Grass

Lesley Dill’s interdisciplinary practice combines sculpture, literature and, more recently, opera. She works with text, with the material of words, the way others carve rock. We had the pleasure of attending a Buddhist retreat together at Poets’ House in Tribeca during June 2012. We bonded over our mutual love for silent walking, and devotion. Since then, we have been meeting monthly to converse about deep practice, dreaming up future performative collaborations, which can only be described as gift giving. Dill has been on the road for the past six months with several major exhibition projects. I catch her as she returns from her show, Poetic Visions: Sister Gertrude Morgan & Shimmer at the Halsey Institute in Charleston, South Carolina. She is about to receive a lifetime achievement award in printmaking from the Southern Graphics Conference International, where she will also launch a new collaborative book, I Had A Blueprint of History.

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“New Kids on the Block | Far Out with Lisa Sanditz,” ART21 Magazine

In 2005, a 64-foot-tall billboard in Lower Manhattan showed a van driving down a mountain against a psychedelic sky. The display was a giant reproduction of the painting “Tie-Dye in the Wilderness” by artist Lisa Sanditz. The cosmic landscape, composed of real and synthetic elements, was a cuckoo complement to its urban environs in New York City, where, to my chagrin, tie-dye has fallen out of favor. Sanditz likes to travel, see faraway places, and then paint these places in far out ways.

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Holton Rower: New Orleans Art Review – Winter 2012

Welcome to the witty, whimsical world of Holton Rower’s Love Heals where dynamically asymmetric compositions composed of concentric, cruciform waves of color with sometimes wacky and delightfully zany names as simple as Birthday Apple and Ontological Relief and as enigmatic as Too Many Zippers Till Being Naked Just Plain Saved Time and Ice Packs And Advil Sure Help But Emotional Calm Is A Deeper Remedy with dimensions ranging from a minimum of fifty-eight inches in one dimension by a maximum of one hundred forty-four inches in another and one and one fourth to eleven and one half inches in depth.

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Deborah Luster: New Orleans Art Review – Winter 2012

Send It On Down is an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Luster related to The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas and The Rosesucker Retablos from the nineteen nineties that rewards the viewer with the sense of having that firm grasp on reality that characterizes the best straight photography and the intellectual satisfaction that comes from technical mastery of the medium and the artist’s sense of design. Although obviously posed and composed, Luster’s photographs have an elusive quality that challenges one’s ability to stay focused on the photographs themselves and their subjects and not to wander into the miasma of interpretation. Like the work of predecessor southern photographers Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Eggleston, Luster’s work evidences a world hitherto unknown to the typical viewer for whom the photographs are surrogate experience in the best tradition of documentary photography. The clarity of the artist’s vision leads one to trust the integrity of the photographer and the photograph, finding interest in what the subjects would consider as ordinary and everyday, an interest that makes the ordinary and everyday something special.

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Rob Wynne: New Orleans Art Review – Winter 2012

When art is word and word is art, what does it signify, where does meaning lie, or need there be meaning at all? Quiver is an exhibition of ambiguous works accessible through multiple interpretations. Words and phrases are as if written on the walls like graffiti written by someone who does not have control of her medium, who may not understand the implications of the words and phrases that are written, floating signifiers existing sans explicit or implicit semantic context, art objects as well as ideas.

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“Review: Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye,” Gambit

What really qualifies as news? A mass shooting at a school understandably generates widespread national outrage, yet the rampant killings in our inner city — or any American inner city — are too routine to garner headlines. The philosopher Hannah Arendt once referred to Nazi genocide as “the banality of evil” for the bureaucratic way it was enacted, but Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye photographs of local murder scenes (now on display at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art) exemplify what might be called the “ordinariness” of evil: The most startling thing about them is how utterly unremarkable they are. Only the photographs’ circular compositions differentiate these scenes from others that go unnoticed on any given day.

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“Ghost Town: Photographer Deborah Luster,” The Advocate

Murder. Victim. Scene. Spirit. Photograph. The unrelenting specter of violence is turned into ethereal art via a distinctive vision by photographer Deborah Luster. Her exhibit, “Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish,” is a compass that pinpoints place, but evokes peace where immeasurable pain and horror once occurred.

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