Artist Distills September 11 Experience In Her Work

Roz Dimon, a Shelter Island artist, was a pioneer in the world of digital media in the early 1990s in New York City. Her work at various financial firms helped support her art. But in early 2001, she lost her job with the online edition of The Wall Street Journal during a period of downsizing.

On September 11, 2001, as news spread that the twin towers of the World Trade Center had been toppled by planes hijacked by terrorists, Ms. Dimon’s mother called her from her home in Georgia, telling her, “Honey, thank God you were down-sized. … Otherwise you would have been marching through those doors just as those planes hit.”

Ms. Dimon said her mother was probably right, that she would have been arriving for work right around the time the towers were struck.

“I escaped with my life, but I was so distraught,” she said. “I felt like my life had been destroyed.”

In the aftermath of September 11, Ms. Dimon and her husband, James Dawson, moved full-time to the home they had recently purchased on Shelter Island. But it wasn’t until she began studying Byzantine icons a few years later that she experienced a reawakening.

“I read that icons were understood to be ‘the strength, shelter, consolation and spiritual reinforcement of a nation which was in danger and later in bondage,’” she said, “and that these flat, multi-layered images sought a new kind of relationship with the viewer through their stories and symbolism.”

Ms. Dimon, who had continued to advance her digital art techniques over the intervening years, developed what she calls DIMONscapes — digital lightbox works of art that allow a viewer to explore the various layers that make up each work by scanning a QR code with a cellphone, which takes them to a web page offering a step-by-step journey through the process by which the piece was assembled.

One of the DIMONscapes that came out of Ms. Dimon’s renaissance is “Pale Male: A Pilgrimage,” a work that she says expresses both the pain of the September 11 upheaval and the hope that comes with finding a new home. In her case, it was on Shelter Island — and in the case of Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk, it was a nest on a window ledge on a luxury apartment on 5th Avenue in New York City.

Besides images of the hawk, viewers can see traces of the World Trade Center, aerial views of the New York skyline, a perfume bottle, the Nike swoosh trademark, and a Perrier bottle, all of which represent the profane. But images of Mary and a crucified Christ also appear, accompanied by the words “Love One Another,” representing the sacred.

In a narration that accompanies “Pale Male: A Pilgrimage,” Ms. Dimon refers to the images of marketing and advertising, but concludes, “The moments that resonate most are uncertifiable, without documentation. They connect to a larger story and erupt from the deep resources of the human heart.”

One of the 10 36-inch-by-48-inch editions of the work is in the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York; another is currently on display at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor, where Ms. Dimon will discuss the work at a reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on September 11.

“The story of Jesus and story of the hawk are both crucial to the piece and to my resurrection as both an artist and a human,” Ms. Dimon said. “The work is an offering — I want it to be seen.”