Rhea Dillon’s “Heads”

The library of the American Academy of Arts and Letters is paneled in warm wood, lit by picture lights, and softened with ornately patterned rugs. The shelves are stocked with books by the Academy’s members—among them Paul Auster, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, and William Faulkner. These have been accumulating since 1923 in a space which, like the best-intentioned of preservation projects, continues to grapple with its identity and the inevitable limits of its documentary mission.

At present, seven shelves have been fitted with additional lights at either end, creating sharp, cinematic angles that dissolve into a diffuse, inviting glow. On each shelf: an oblong cut crystal plate, coated in layers of molasses and discernible chunks of soil, pitched distinctively and angled towards cardinal east or west within wood-trimmed glass vitrines. In a nod to her own British-Jamaican heritage, cut crystal is repeatedly deployed in Dillon’s work as a symbol for the shared habits, memories, and aspirations of the Caribbean community in England. Constructed from sapele, a tropical African hardwood often substituted for mahogany and prized for both its durability and its patina, the vitrines bookend a series of titles hand-selected by the artist. Three volumes of the correspondence of W.E.B. DuBois are shelved alongside Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990). A touch heavy-handed, the implication is abundantly clear: the record remains biased, replete with holes.

Using the readymade as a wedge, “Heads” illustrates how grandeur congeals accepted histories by placing a studied counter-emphasis on the quiet and the quotidian. The library itself, with its hushed, hallowed aura, is primed for Dillon’s intervention. If her work illuminates the uneasy relationship between archives, story, and lived experience, the space becomes just as much a found object as her crystal plates, her molasses, and her curated group of first editions. It stands as a monument to countless attempts to capture, describe, convey, or otherwise forge meaning through language. If the plates invite a specific Caribbean-British sensibility into the room, then the room itself is there to underscore its own limits. Because even as it has become fashionable to critique “the archive” as a kind of container, the rhetoric we rely on to do so remains relatively empirical. We talk about gaps, constructions, absences, and though we may acknowledge that “history is written by the victors”, to fully admit the extent to which this is true is to allow in the specter of both fiction and happenstance, making history almost too soft, too malleable for comfort.

But this murkiness is precisely the point. Emphasizing poetry and obfuscation as productive methods of abstraction, Dillon’s practice often probes the limits of representation, not so much in a political or democratic sense, but a descriptive, semiotic one. Her work is interested in the myth of saying exactly what we mean, and the discursive utility of symbolic imprecision. Her subtle pieces require attention: an object placed just so, situated to invite an alternative understanding of passively accepted truths. She embraces language’s ability to both describe and create simultaneously. If her project is to destabilize and rewrite the accepted myths around Black identity—often narratives authored by the colonial project, and reinforced by its aftershocks—she explores how language can be used to illuminate, alter, and restitch such assumptions just as much as it was exploited to erect them in the first place. This understanding of narrative as the base tool through which we build our everyday dovetails with Dillon’s reverence for the mundane, daily object. The found object, in Dillon’s positioning, becomes conductive, charged with metaphor. Or put another way, it operates not unlike a word: a sign within a semiotic system of symbols, signifiers, and slippery meaning.

What is interesting is where this capacity stops, or rather short-circuits into static. “Heads” makes the case that this happens with depictions of place, and specifically land. Though Dillon has quite literally brought the land into the work through the layers of molasses and soil collected from various parts of Jamaica, the representation glitches. Here, through the lens of place, she obliquely gestures at the impossibility of complete comprehension, of exhaustive documentation, and of a narrative structure capable of carrying such a totality. The system of relation is too complex; the work must be done in fragments.

In this light, the selected texts by Caribbean writers now make a neat allusion back to the limits of language as a system in itself. By constellating our existing tools of representation (objects, texts, imagery) and proving their inability to communicate the essence of a place, Dillon makes a rather elegant case to instead embrace that failure. That these natural materials, the molasses and the dirt, will degrade, shift, and decompose over time only furthers her argument that we must give our assumptions the necessary grace to change.