NYAB Event - Laddie John Dill "Contained Radiance"

Laddie John Dill "Contained Radiance"

Nyehaus

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Laddie John Dill (LJD) is a central figure in the group of artists known as “Light and Space,” albeit a few years younger. Within the context of Southern California in the late 60s, Dill quickly pushed his way into the conversation of how to evoke the region’s unique landscape, a collision of natural and architectural beauty, and industrial toxic waste.

LJD’s work from the late 60s and early 70s began with unadorned colored argon tubing welded together in repeating patterns of color, and “floor paintings,” a combination of sand, glass and fluorescent lighting installations The “light sentences,” as LJD would later refer to them, were experiments in alchemy: wielding the presence and absence of mercury, uranium and helium as a wizard waves his wand. The ambience of the light was carefully controlled to keep the work contained in its immediate footprint – a fundamental difference with his East Coast fluorescent saber brandishing counterpart. While Flavin’s work flaunted fixtures almost as ready-mades, using the radiating environmental power of fluorescence to create much more environmental work, Dill’s light sentences were softer and more nuanced, achieving mathematical melodic rhythms that captured transitions of color within welded sections.

The light, glass, and fluorescent tube work that followed the argon works flicker between the evocative and the actual. The intrinsically sublime properties of sand and its chemically altered form, glass, simultaneously strip away conceptual associations to nature and re-affirm them as artistic medium. At the same time, the drifts of sand quite literally create landscapes fading into the distance. LJD uses these materials as if sunlight were harnessed in his arsenal of tools.

Laddie John Dill was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and in 1971 had his first solo exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in New York. Dill has shown extensively at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sao Paulo; and Sun Gallery, Seoul. His work is also part of numerous public collections such as the Chicago Art Institute, Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.

Dill is the recipient of two National Endowment grants; one for sculpture and one for painting, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting. He has taught extensively at UCLA, UC Irvine, and the Art Center in Pasadena, and lectured in numerous universities and art institutions across the United States.