LESLEY DILL

Rooted in language and driven by the power of words, Lesley Dill’s 20-year retrospective at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, leads viewers through a dreamy collection of works where the voices of Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and the poet Tom Sleigh are channeled through the lips and on the skin of her creations.

In some instances, words seem to physically manifest and coalesce to form capillaries, lifeblood pumping through the artist’s sculptural works. While on one hand nourishing, these same dermal prose strangle like ivy, concealing secrets from the outside world. Not all of Dill’s words are bound. In Dress of Opening and Close of Being shown alongside Rapture’s Germination, we see language explode, trumpeting from figures and careening across canvases.

Lesley Dill, Faith, 2010, cast bronze, 60 x 26 x 18″. Photo: Clements Photography and Design, Boston. Courtesy of the artist and George Adams Gallery, NY.

Somewhere between the silence and the screams, the subtle whispers of words are where the hand of the artist is felt most strongly. Within the painstaking details of her oeuvre lies a tenderness, even the harshest and most rigid of materials seem to yield at the artist’s touch.

Despite the enormity of Dill’s metallic frieze, Rush, there is still this same sense of intimacy that is readily found in her smaller works. The 67-foot piece, which undulates like a large woven tapestry, is a visual thought cloud comprised of hundreds of silhouetted figures that shimmer in and out of view beneath gallery lights, sprung from the mind of a small, seated figure at the far end of the space. The metal foil is not smooth like one large mirror. Rather it has been hand-scrubbed and meticulously weathered by Dill. The frenzied crowd of mythological beings is linked together by wires and thread, sinews that serve as a connective tissue for the
collective consciousness.

Not tethered by medium, Dill’s survey is a true journey that explores the richness of materials and the power of language. Much like the works themselves, this artist comes to you with palms outstretched, revealing her inner sanctum and sharing the relics of her evolution.