Laddie John Dill

     Perception is the medium itself. Non-specific objects are a means to an end, the end being the perceptual experience.  

                                                                                                     -Gisela Colón 

     I’m like a boy with a butterfly net, except my net is my art and the butterfly that I am after is light.

                                                                                                      -Laddie John Dill

Malin Gallery - Aspen is proud to presentLight Is The Object - an exhibition of sculptures and installation work by the renowned Light and Space artist Laddie John Dill. The exhibition features eight examples of the artist’s on-going Light Sentence series along with a site specific Light Plains installation and a large-scale Light Catcher sculpture. Light Is the Object is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

In the late 1960s, Laddie John Dill emerged as one of the key progenitors of the West Coast Light and Space movement in Los Angeles along with a number of other loosely-affiliated artists including James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, De Wain Valentine, Ron Cooper, John McCracken and Helen Pashgian.  Although each artist developed a singular approach, they shared a key set of influences associated with the Southern California environs. The term “Light and Space” was inspired by a 1971 exhibition at the UCLA University Art Gallery entitled Transparency, Light, Space: Four Artists featuring Laddie John Dill along with Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and Craig Kaufmann.

Beyond the environmental and cultural characteristics of the Southern California milieu, an additional key influence on the Light and Space artists was the industrial technologies that flourished between the 1950s and 1970s in Southern California, particularly those associated with the Aviation and Aerospace Industries. These industries were a fertile source for new technology for the Light and Space artists, who experimented extensively with novel materials and industrial technologies.

The Light and Space movement was anchored by multiple poles: the natural environment and light of Southern California; groundbreaking experiments in materiality and an abiding interest in the physiological and psychological aspects of perception. The Light and Space artists employed novel techniques to produce art that engaged the fundamental perceptual processes of the viewer - particularly as regards the sensory and psychological impact of light. As Malcolm Morano has noted:

Ethereal and atmospheric…the experiences of the Light and Space movement present a striking paradox to the viewer, one that requires active, and often multi-sensory, participation…There is no single defining aesthetic…but instead a preoccupation with the viewer's perception and participation.

Laddie John Dill grew up in Malibu, California. As an avid surfer, his immersion in an environment of light, water and sand were abiding influences. Concurrently, Dill gained deep experience in science and technology and an engagement with the study of light from an early age.  Dill’s stepfather was a scientist and mathematician who studied the properties of lenses and developed early versions of “night vision” technologies. Lasers were constantly present in the house, and Dill also developed an interest in the lighting aspects of the film arts and stage design. To this day, Dill considers his singular type of creative expression to be grounded in empirical investigation involving deep analysis of materials and scientific experimentation with light, electrified gases and organic materials.

After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute in 1968, Dill served as a printing apprentice at the technically innovative artist’s workshop and publisher G.E.L. Gemini, where he collaborated with artistic luminaries from both the east and west coasts, including Robert Rauschenberg, Clause Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. While working at Rio Score’s commercial sign shop in Los Angeles, Dill learned how to weld glass tubes and coat their interiors with fluorescent emulsions to create different various effects using electrified gases

Among the artists he met through working at G.E.L. Gemini, Dill became particularly close to Robert Rauschenberg. The two artists staged a joint exhibition in 1970 entitled The Light Show. Visiting Dill’s studio, Rauschenberg was intrigued by an early version of one of Dill’s Light Plains installations composed of argon and neon tubes and roughly seven thousand pounds of sand. Rauschenberg brought the influential gallerist Ileana Sonnabend to see this work - a meeting which led to solo exhibitions for Dill at the famed Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1971 and 1972, making Dill the first Light and Space artist to exhibit on the East Coast. At the Sonnabend Gallery exhibition, Dill showed another Light Plains sculpture fashioned from mounds of sand with partially buried panes of glass, which were illuminated from below by argon and neon light.

Composed of sand, glass and argon and neon lights, the Light Plains installations are often site-specific works. Dill typically creates these works from sand, with argon or neon lights submerged under the sand with glass panes emerging. The light from the submerged light tubes serves to illuminate the perimeters of the glass panes in an ethereal manner. The light panes create reflective, fractured casts of light, which are variously illuminated in the other panes of glass. The Light Plains works yield an enigmatic atmosphere through an endlessly compelling interplay of earth, light, and glass. Since showing his first Light Plains sculpture to Ileana Sonnabend in 1969, Dill has created unique, often site-specific Light Plains works around the world. For each work, Dill uses local materials and arranges the glass planes and other materials to suit the space and local environment. In describing Dill’s alchemical incorporation of sand, glass and neon or argon lights, Malcolm Morano has commented that the Lights Plains sculptures “create a fiber optic effect that appears as though it has been exhumed from the earth’s core.” For the current exhibition, Dill created Light Plains / Aspen (2021) on-site in the gallery.