Extract Artists Laddie John Dill and Chris Wilder Present April 1, 2011

Extract: Developing Exhibitions from the Collection artists Laddie John Dill and Chris Wilder will talk about their work and answer questions from the audience.

Laddie John Dill’s early installation work has recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was included in the much heralded 2010 exhibition Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 at David Zwirner, New York.

Dill was born in Long Beach and attended Santa Monica High School. He graduated from Chouinard Art Institute in 1968. By the time Dill was 28, he was offered his first one-man exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York.

After graduation from Chouinard, Dill recalled, “I needed a job but I wanted to work where I could further my education as well.” As an apprentice printer at Gemini G.E.L., located in West Hollywood, Dill had the opportunity to work closely with established artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claus Oldenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Dialog between artists of the 1970s resulted in experiments with materials previously not considered traditional art media, such as neon, sticks, wax, cement, and the relationship of those materials to each other. “It was a good healthy time for experimentation,” Dill explained. “I was influenced by Rauschenberg, Keith Sonnier, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Irwin, who were working with earth materials, light, and space as an alternative to easel painting.”

Dill began experimenting first with neon and argon tubing, arranging the delicate, gas-filled, glass tubes into wall pieces. “I soon became interested in throwing the light against irregular surfaces such as brick walls, etc.”

Dill moved on to working three-dimensionally and filled a room in his studio with 10,000 pounds of silica sand. It was there that he mixed light and sand to create pieces which were more like painting than sculpture. “It was very much like doing a painting, except that it was on the floor, and I used shovels and brooms instead of a brush.”

During the 1970s Dill also began experimenting with wall pieces using cement in contrast with the smooth surface of glass. Using natural pigments he incorporates in his work a wide range of colors—brick reds derived from iron oxide, coal blacks from black sulphur, yellows, and naturally mined cobalt blues. Combinations of these natural pigments create a variety of brilliant but still “organic” colors.

Chris Wilder
Like colleague Mike Kelley, Wilder was involved in the Los Angeles punk music scene in the late 1980s at the same time was making pieces like his UFO Sighting series. Wilder’s work from this series involves pairing one of the main tenets of Conceptualism, that the “idea” is more important than its physical manifestation, with the notion of UFO’s and the general lack of physical support, or evidence, supporting the idea.

In newer work like White Monochrome Fur Painting, Wilder is more blatant in his reference to the pursuits of high modernism in painting. He uses glib, but surprisingly effective, common, cheap fur to make a comment on minimalist painting.

Chris Wilder was born in Long Beach in 1957. Wilder attended both the San Francisco Art Institute (1985) and the California Institute of the Arts (1988).

This event is free to Museum Members and free to non-members with paid admission.
For more information, please contact Curator of Education Jacqueline Bunge at 949.494.8971 x207.