Lesley Dill, Dress of Solace and Undoing (2006), metal foil, organza, wire [Whatcom Museum, Bellingham WA, Oct 23-Mar 4] Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York

Lesley Dill, Hell Hell Hell / Heaven Heaven Heaven: Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan and Revelation, detail [Whatcom Museum, Bellingham WA, Oct 23-Mar 4] Courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans

Lesley Dill’s innovative art practice combines elements of language, poetry, performance and multi-media visual art to explore themes of faith and spirituality through the human form and its coverings.

Throughout her career lyrical vocabulary has been a binding factor in Dill’s artworks, serving as a bridge to the inner world of universal emotions and complexities. The Poetic Visions exhibit focuses on two bodies of work; metallic sculptures like Shimmer and a 2010 installation based on the life of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), a New Orleans preacher and missionary who used her music and art as tools of her ministry.

For the installation Hell Hell Hell/Heaven Heaven Heaven: Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan and Revelation, Dill constructed two lavish gowns to reflect Morgan’s early life and her life after she experienced a divine revelation that she had been chosen to be the bride of Christ. The white-based wedding gown, adorned with text and cascading train-like banners that speak of her calling, is visually connected to the other black-based dress in a unified space draped with poetic references. The strong use of meaningful words string together a journey between heaven and hell, dark and light, good and evil.

Shimmer, the other main piece that composes the core of this show, is a dramatic oceanic wall-mounted work made of thousands of feet of silvery wire threads. The cascading 60-foot-long sculpture is integrated with the mystical poetry of Salvador Espriu (1913-1985) and materiality evokes a relationship between the physical and the spiritual. Metaphoric imagery in Dill’s installations illuminates aspects of the diversity of faith traditions and the underlying notions of transcendental experience.

www.whatcommuseum.org

Allyn Cantor