Sticks and Stones
BY DAVID BIBBLE

LESLEY DILL
Recent Works
Arthur Roger Gallery
New Orleans, LA

"WHAT ARE WORDS for, when no one listens anymore?" — Missing Persons.

Ghost Hole Poem Girl, 1996.

Nationally-recognized artist Lesley Dill is a familiar and instantly identifiable exhibitor at Arthur Roger Gallery. Working with a wide range of materials but always incorporating textual elements, the thematic constant is text, with all the literary and linguistic baggage that element carries. She further loads the intellectual palette by juxtaposing this text with the human body to call attention to the relationship of words and poetry to clothing and the naked body. Her constructions highlighting interrelations of text and the human body are complex and subtle, and a room full of such works is a surfeit of nuanced provocation.

Dill has chosen the poetic work of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) as catalyst for her visual work. In her artist statement, she notes that the poems of Dickinson are useful to her "for their embodiment of psychological states of despair and euphoria as metaphors for being." Dickinson was a highly private poet of the interior self, expressing herself almost entirely through poems and letters rattier than inter-personal contact. As a result of her withdrawal from social contact, her writing blossomed, nourished as it was by the poet's need for emotional expression; today she is known for creating tightly constructed poems that reverberate with the poet's eloquent frustration and despair. Dill's art interprets Dickinson through visual means, providing commentary and adding her own multi-layered reading of Dickinson's most haunting passages.

As testament to the raw power of words, Dill has transcribed Dickinson's poem "The Soul has bandaged moments...," fashioning the words from twisted wire, thread and strands of horsehair into a distressed scrim of words covering a wall seven by sixteen feet with an all-over field of text. The tenacious determination of the frail, attenuated words clinging to the walls resonates sympathetically with the meaning of the poem.

Dickinson, who rarely left her Amherst, Massachusetts house, created rich poetic tapestries out of her dreary domesticity; in the series of eight "rollups," long sheets of muslin stained with tea, Dill emulates Dickinson by creating a rich sensory experience out of common household materials. These works are long strips of muslin, each approximately 140 by 40 inches, irregularly hand-stained with tea, with images of the human body photosilkcreened onto them. The models often have words painted on their bodies, or Dill will apply further words directly to the muslin in oil paint over the images. Frequently, she uses thread and bandages to augment the vulnerability of the bodies. One piece. Blue Poem Dress, is particularly poignant, quoting the poem "A single screw of flesh..." over a woman in a dress, draped with thread, and with a barely visible needle stuck into the muslin at about eye level. Suggesting the unfinished quality of the work (many of Dickinson's poems were never finished) as well as the hand of the artist, the work somehow also manages to hint at me cloistered domestic world of the 19th century woman.

Dill is that rare bird, the visual artist who is equally facile with words and images. Hers is a sensitive translation of Dickinson's rich poetry into the language of the visual. Traditionally, elliptical work such as Dickinson's is difficult to comprehend without reading aloud, and Dill, filtering Dickinson through her art. provides an effective visual reading. If, as 1980s new wave band Missing Persons suggests in the above quote, no one listens to words anymore, perhaps they will listen to the visual poetry of Lesley Dill. The artist's ideas are wider in scope than merely translating or re-representing Dickinson, of course; because she has rendered the poems so sensitively, I have treated this aspect of the work at some length. Dill's own ideas about words are quite interesting and poetic in their own right, and deserve mention. In her statement, Dill thinks metaphorically about words as a kind of armor that we wear both to represent ourselves to others and to protect ourselves from the outside world. Certainly this was true for the reclusive Dickinson. Dill seems to qualify this notion of words as personal armor in Ghost Hole Poem Girl, in which a figure is limned in circular holes cut from the muslin and festooned with faint thread, accompanied by the poem: If you are the Dreamer / I am what you dream/ I grow and turn into/ A star's vast Silence.... In this work, the artist seems to assert the power of definition that words can have, a power often abused by the author of such words; the image suggests the loss of self that can accompany definition at the hands of others. Dill further waxes poetic about the way language, even unspoken, can color, or "stain," our lives; hence the tea stains coloring the muslin "rollups" representing the often inexpressible, barely understood sea of words in which we are constantly awash. Dill's artistic vision is an obliquely rendered one, informed by literary models to create an original synthesis of text and image. If anything, these recent works are more subtle, less literal than earlier efforts, and this added sophistication shows promise of more to come.