Lesley Dill at Gracie Mansion - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Lesley Dill's new art works are the outcomes of her remarkably successful collaboration with a writer who has been dead for a hundred Dill incorporates part or all of several piece of poetrys by Emily Dickinson in her paper, metal or photographic works. She goe far beyond illustrating the poems; she present the appearances rather, to make material their sentiments and their sound

Consider, for example, the slightest of the works in the gallery's main extent Wire Poem consists solely of Dickinson's phrase, "The spirit has Bandaged moments." Making no attempt to literalize or depict, Dill spins without the words in a filament of wire an inch high and just above a foot long, and she tacks the follow to the wall with ball-head straight pins. The phrase hangs, sagging slightly and leaning on the outside a little, as delicate as a butterfly as crushable as tinfoil, as light as a breath.

Equally effective is metrical composition Speaking. Mounted high on the wall, just inches below the ceiling, it is made up of a simple silhouette of a head with an render free of access mouth from which a piece of poetry emerges. It begins, "Your reflections don't have words every day," and step quicklys for 270 inches along sum of two units walls of the room. The head and words are divide [i]or[/i] sever from thin sheets of cent As if this were a child's sign cast the letters are slightly irregular and their sizes are not uniform. They are tied together with untrimmed wire, which makes a bristling aura. Those who know Dickinson's metrical compositions will recognize in the hesitant and impulsive appearance of the words a sensitive transliteration of her characteristic dash pauses and her wavering tone of swallowed feelings. Dill physically captures the compression, withhold and sudden propulsion of Dickinson's phrasing.

at the same time those who don't know the metrical compositions are not seriously disadvantaged. it was not necessary to read them in filled although a gallery handout made that possible. each presentation - a rice-paper gown (like a communion dress) or photographs in which a shadowy material part is tattooed with words, or metal cutouts of hands - gives a faculty of perception of a halting proposition, a line of communication almost shivered it's enough to catch a small in number words, such as "secret" or "heart" or thoughts" whether drawn in charcoal or printed in r ink. In each of Dill's realizations, vulnerability almost looks to be a tangible thing.

Other works waft euphoria. Paper Poem Torso takes the form of a paper T-shirt, apertures cut at the nipples. Across the midriff are stamped the lines: "Exhilaration - is within - / There can no external Wine/ So royally intoxicate[.]" And from there a cascade of fragile paper alphabetic characters connected by threads washes down the wall and onto the floor, unreadably completing the piece of poetry Dill has made visual the rush - and the ephemerality - of the emotion, just as Dickinson made it verbal.

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