Lydia Dildilian

Artist Bio:
Lydia Dildilian’s work seeks to explore unknown geographies of the future through highly complex and saturated landscape paintings or abstracted drawings. By collapsing, colliding, and converging focal points between blurred and sharpened features, Dildilian translates layered landscapes found and captured from photographs, video games, and appropriated images into recursive and experimental spaces. Dildilian received her BFA in painting and drawing with a minor in classical literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 2012, and her MFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL in 2016. Her prolific art career includes 11 solo exhibitions, over 60 group shows, 4 publications, and belongs to several private collections across the United States and Italy. Currently, Dildililian is the Art Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Green Bay, where she teaches painting, drawing, design foundations course, art history, and runs the Marinette campus fine art gallery.

Artist Statement:
My work seeks to explore unknown geographies of the future. Uncertainty, chaos, and the overwhelming sense of disorientation are far too familiar feelings. These themes push the paradigm of looking so far ahead, we forget where we are, and ignorantly press forward into the tangled brush of our own future demise.

The viewer is rooted in the present, with innumerable layers of thick brush, fragments, roots, and digitally rendered organic material beyond their field of vision. It would feel almost magical if it were not simultaneously disenchanting. Our perspective affords unimaginable sights of the land, but it also reveals the perilous simulacra of a functional ecosystem. There is no function, only aesthetics.

These landscapes are both familiar and foreign, a promise of our actions come to fruition. We are lost in an impossible world with exotic colored fauna, failing to see these colorful corruptions in the forests, oceans, and marshes we wade through as they blend with our platitudes of ‘more’. These works ooze with more color, more trees, more water, more sky, yet rather than feeling abundant, they feel toxic. These lands are then excessive in every sense; these lands are more and moor.