The moment you walk into the Bates College Museum of Art’s Lesley Dill exhibition “Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me” (through March 26), you’re engulfed in a torrent of words. They fill banners that stretch across whole walls and adorn the garments of ghostly sculptures standing or hanging in the gallery, not to mention the wall texts accompanying each piece.

It is obvious, as we take in the extraordinary amount of text on display, that Dill is an extremely literate woman, steeped in American history and its chronicles. These include the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Edward Taylor, the speeches and biographies of abolitionists/activists such as Sojourner Truth and John Brown, and the autobiographical writings of the Sauk warrior Black Hawk and Mary Rowlandson, who was kidnapped by Native Americans in 1676 and held for 11 weeks.

It is equally clear that Dill is a deeply spiritual person. This is evidenced by her choice of religious figures as subjects for her work. Among these we find Mother Ann Lee (founder of the American Shakers), the missionary and artist Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Ann Hutchinson, a preacher and religious reformer tried and banished for challenging her male preachers’ spiritual orientations toward a damning – rather than compassionate – God.

Essentially, the show is about “early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, and fears of the wilderness ‘out there’ and inside us,” as described by the museum. Of course, the wilderness inside us – that of the human soul – was a paramount concern for many of Dill’s historical subjects.

In that wilderness they saw untamable desire (here represented by Hester Prynne, the adulterous protagonist of Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”), the lust that impedes the Lord’s work (Mother Lee and Shaker celibacy), the stain of racism and other forms of inhumanity (the murder of John Brown, multiple defeats for Dred and Harriet Scott’s freedom trials, the theft of Native American lands), or the use of religion to guilt and subjugate women (Rowlandson).

But divinity is also everywhere in this exhibition. All these figures drew their strength from a belief that we’re in direct relationship with God or some other transcendent force (i.e., nature). They exemplify many early American religious societies, including The Great Awakening, Puritan, anabaptist and evangelical movements, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

As we read the words of these figures and their histories, we do get a sense of the constrictions colonial America placed on these freer thinkers. We also appreciate the bravery and steadfastness they summoned to counter convention and defend justice, as well as the ruinous consequences of their battles – persecution, social ostracism, banishment, death.

But here’s the thing about all the words: They feel visually dizzying and at times more intellectual indulgence than artistic vision. I am speaking specifically about the “story banners” that quote speeches or writings by each figure. Dill, of course, does not feel that way. In one of the recordings that accompany the virtual version of the exhibition she says, “I am an artist for whom text has an almost magical transformative power, those sculptural twists of letters that transmit emotions and thoughts inside us.”

However, because the banners showcase multiple typefaces and do not follow straight lines, they can obscure the words that so move Dill. There is artfulness to this presentation, of course, but it works counterproductively here by making the messages less accessible to the viewer.

I’m not sure how many people will have the patience or inclination to struggle with deciphering more than a few of these banners, especially those placed so high that you must crook your neck to read them.

After a while I found myself ignoring the words themselves and instead simply taking in interesting jumbles of type, and the wonderful illustrations interspersed throughout them; Dred Scott with surreally attenuated legs that snake and braid together, for example, or John Brown, whose arms morph into all manner of weaponry and whose bizarrely long beard appears to be curling and swirling away from him.

The banners do effectively evoke a sense of being immersed in the minds of the figures, yet another difficulty I have with them is that they distract from the three-dimensional sculptures, which consist of apparel in the style of what each might have worn (pantaloons and frock coats, religious habits, prim high-collar dresses).

These sculptures function as more than mere effigies. They emanate the living presence of each figure, so that we feel we are in a hall of ghosts. We can sense their formidable courage and their righteousness, their interiority as well as their public eloquence.

They are also exquisitely crafted, their own labor-intensive creation representing a kind of devotional act. One can easily imagine Dill creating them in a kind of trance state not dissimilar to those experienced by many of her subjects. The figure of Hester Prynne, for instance, is a mannequin attired in a dress composed of hundreds of hand-cut silk oak leaves. Dill depicts the letter on Prynne’s chest in white to symbolize her essential goodness rather than the deviltry of the sin she committed.

Prynne’s hair is piled on top of her head, but individual locks cascade down onto the dress and beyond it, each featuring words from “The Scarlet Letter” about how Prynne found solace in “the sympathy of nature” or the lesson to be learned from her sad tale in “some sweet moral blossom” (in this case, a rose).

For the Rowlandson figure, Dill embroidered the captive’s words onto her dress using horsehair to indicate the animals tended to by her captors. John Brown’s floor-length beard is also made of cascading horsehair. Ann Lee’s dress, in a traditional Shaker yellow, is painted with fellow Shaker Hannah Cahoon’s vision of an image of a burning tree. On its hem are two handmade dolls representing Shakers as the instruments who received the order’s religious writings and visions. (Wonderful handmade dolls for most of the larger figures look like studies in miniature for the final sculptures.)

For painter Horace Pippin, whose oeuvre explored seminal Black figures and his experiences of racism, Dill embroidered his hair using black thread. Bits of loose or looping colored threads seem to symbolize his kaleidoscopic palette. Painted onto the perfectly sewn black suit he wears are his words: “Pictures come to my head, and I tell my heart to go ahead.”

The words on the figures feel more effective than those on the story banners. And in any case, most of those words appear on the wall texts. They are powerful words indeed. Take Black Hawk’s blistering observation: “How smooth must be the language of whites, when they can make right look wrong and wrong look right.” These words were as pertinent then as they are now, when we continue to unravel the legacy of Donald Trump’s loose grasp on – or outright disregard of – truth.

The words can also be an encouraging balm. We learn, for example, that Rowland’s experience as a captive transformed her from someone who referred to Native Americans as “godless hellhound savages” to one who recognized that “not one of the Indians offered the least miscarriage to me” during the time they held her.

I wonder what my experience of this exhibit would have been had the story banners at least been edited down. Instead of being constantly aware of the maelstrom of words around me, I suspect I would have been stilled into the kind of quiet, sober contemplativeness prized by Dill’s subjects as well as the artist herself.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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