The Department of Art, Art History, and Design is pleased to announce that American contemporary artist, Lesley Dill, will be this year’s featured speaker. The public lecture, "WILDERNESS: Light Sizzles Around Me," will take place on March 20 at 5 p.m. in the Annenberg Auditorium at the Snite Research Center for the Visual Arts.
Lesley Dill is one of the most prominent American artists working at the intersection of language and fine art. Her elegant sculptures, art installations, mixed-media photographs, and evocative performances draw from both her travels abroad and profound interests in spirituality and the world’s faith traditions. Exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche, Dill invests new meaning in the human form. Intellectually and aesthetical engaging, the core of her work emerges from an essential, visionary awareness of the world.
Fluid metaphors, appropriated from the poetry and writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, connect the diverse media that Dill employs. Paper, wire, horsehair, photography, foil, bronze, and music comprise elements through which the artist conveys the complexities of communication. The often secret, indecipherable, and bold meanings of words emerge not only from hearing their sounds, but by feeling them—language is a visceral, bodily experience. Dill challenges the viewer to confront our linguistic relationships as well as perceptions of language itself.
This research event is made possible in part by support from the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, Creative Writing, and Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA).