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ladd i e john d i ll th e ti ta n by Taylor Barnes
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pon entering Venice artist Laddie John Dill’s studio in the Sunset Avenue warehouse district, it takes a moment for one’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then, Dill flips a switch and the studio suddenly comes to life with “Light Sentences,” his long, custom-made glass tubes illuminated with gemlike, fluorescent color that glow from recessed spaces in the white walls. The various colors from the electric light sculptures immediately transform the room. With an extraordinary career stretching over fifty years, the prolific artist has worked with light and transmutable surfaces since the 1970s when he first affiliated himself with the West Coast Light and Space art movement.
Dill attended the Chouinard Institute of Art in the 1960s, a prodigious art school that has produced many of the most successful West Coast artists of that period, including Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, Charles Arnoldi. “A lot of artists came out of this little school in downtown L.A., where they had a hard time affording a new saw blade for the single saw they had for the sculpture department,” Dill says of his alma mater. After graduation, Dill took a job at Gemini gallery, which published hand-printed limited edition lithographs, and eventually became very good friends with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In fact, he lived in Johns’s studio in New York when he was away and would later move into Rauschenberg’s studio. “I got lucky!” Dill says of his relatively facile transition to New York. “I remember thinking, ‘This New York thing is really cool!” While Dill modestly attributes the origins of his longstanding friendships with Rauschenberg and Johns partly to being in the right place at the right time during his twenties, the fact that he had his first New York show fairly quickly hints at a potent combination of fortuity and preparation. “The timing was right. I showed with Illeana Sonnabend, who was with Leo Castelli at the time,” he recalls. “The only reason they saw my work was because Andy Warhol had a show at the Pasadena Museum of Art and they were all in town. Bob Rauschenberg said, ‘you gotta see this guy’s work.’ They came over and they offered me a show.” That was in 1971—when Dill was just 28 years old. Dill would go on to steadily build a stellar art career over the next forty years. His list of exhibitions on multiple continents now spans several pages and his work can be found in many prominent private art collections, as well as the permanent collections of more than two dozen museums. The award-winning artist is also a recipient of two National Endowment grants and a Guggenheim Photograph by TAYLOR BARNES
3.1 Venice Magazine 3point1–venice.com
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