ART CITIES:Paris-Sophia Dixon Dillo
The concept that the light is always present but not always seen is the core of Sophia’s Dixon Dillo work. Through large scale installation or minimal painting, she engages with the internal contradiction between the materiality of the work and the immateriality of light.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Fatiha Selam
The research of the American artist Sophia Dixon Dillo is to make the light visible. Working with transparent, translucent, and reflective materials in combination with all-over patterning. Sophia Dixon Dillo creates works that incorporate light and shadow on and between the surfaces, reflecting her lifelong connection with Zen. In her first solo exhibition in Europe, entitled “Light and Form”, at Galerie Fatiha Selam in Paris, she presents installations made of fishing lines as well as works on paper whose carved reliefs create different patterns depending on the dynamics of the viewer. The artist worked with 35 km of fine fishing line to create her light installation to create a web in the space of the gallery, tracing vectors between the walls of the gallery. These appear in our field of vision as fragile sails that remain almost invisible, but through natural or artificial lighting the impalpable wave of its presence is revealed to us, our perception must distinguish between the physical reality of the linear tension and the immaterial sensation created by the veil. Sophia Dixon Dillo’s small works on paper are, by contrast, as quiet as a whisper. The artist uses a thin knife to create small, sometimes tiny slits in the surface of the paper, lifting it into a subtle relief. With an infinite patience in which she invites us to participate, she repeats these slits in patterned variations, creating enchanting effects. Their obsessiveness speaks of an inwardly-directed vision, the search for an always elusive perfection that is characterized, paradoxically, by its opposite, the imperfection that is built into our human nature.
Info: Galerie Fatiha Selam, 58 rue Chapon, Paris, Duration: 21/11/15-16/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.fatihaselam.fr
