Visiting Artist-Researcher: Rhea Dillon
Untitled, 2018
Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London. Through her practice she examines and abstracts her intrigue of the "rules of representation" as a device to undermine contemporary Western culture, as well as, seeking to continually question what constitutes as the ontology of Blackness versus the ontic.
At Wendy's Subway, Rhea Dillon is focusing on Caribbean poetics and Creolization through readings of poetry by June Jordan and Derek Walcott and Kamau Braithwaite's book-length essay, Roots (1986).
Recent solo exhibitions include The Sombre Majesty (or on being the pronounced dead) at Soft Opening, London (2022) and Nonbody Nonthing No Thing at V.O Curations, London (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Bold Tendencies, London (Current, 2022); Division of Labour, UK (2021); Drawing a Blank, Paris (2020); Almine Rech, London (2020); and Peak Gallery, London (2020). Other projects include Catgut — The Opera, a Serpentine Park Nights Commission, London (2021) and Uchronia et Uchromia, an online net artwork and exhibition commissioned by External Pages (2020). Dillon also founded Lecture Performa, a series that invites artists from across the digital diaspora to engage in natural inquiry and critical thought through lecture-performance. Last year she published her first chapbook of poetry and text, Donald Dahmer (V.O Print, 2021).
Portrait of Rhea Dillon
"Theory in itself is myth. People are constantly building language to understand the frameworks in which we exist, so I see that as just what I am innately doing. I’m seeking out other people's ideas, other people's myths, that help me explain the experience that I am living in or the experience that I would like to live in. I feel that’s where these extensions of language towards fabulation come in: as mythbuiding. Artists are also mythbuilders I believe. Or myth players—a jazz player methodology perhaps.
I’ve always been a reader, I’ve always been a keen observer and these things come from the same place. There is a lot of observation and practice through language and I think if you create and expand time for yourself to think through things there is nothing more powerful for that than poetry and theory. That’s where a lot of my language building comes from and what I care to nurture."
—Rhea Dillon, from "To hold truth on your tongue or in your hand," interview by Dara Jochum, Spike Art Magazine, July 13, 2022.