Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Kim Dingle. Dingle’s exhibition presents three new bodies of work made in 2016 – 2017: Freight Train Crushes, Home Depot Coloring Books, and Blindfold Paintings.
The Freight Train Crushes pair huge colorful paintings on glassine, crushed into outsized wads like so much old newspaper, with down-scaled paintings on mounted C-prints. Their compositions suggest storyboards and graphic novels. The paintings include snippets of figures that echo Dingle’s earlier work, but here gesture and patterns take on a new role as main characters. Dingle has used the mounted prints almost like coloring books: attempting to re-create each brush stroke from the original painting on their surfaces. This ultimately impossible task results in a new painting each time, evoking the artist’s ongoing interest in the function of narrative devices and memory.
The Home Depot Coloring Books are a series of new “nature” paintings on OSB (oriented structure board) that Dingle insists anyone could make. Following the patterns innate to the surface of the OSB, Dingle paints the visible chips of wood until the composition feels complete. The process results in a surprising amount of depth, suggestions of light and shadow, even movement in a field of flowers or across the surface of water.
The Blindfold Paintings are presented in Gallery 3. These paintings of children in frilly socks, Peter pan¬¬ collars, and wire-rimmed glasses seem a bit off, with body parts ever so slightly misplaced. The artist made these works while blindfolded, using only muscle-memory as her guide. Dingle has played with clichéd critiques of modern art in the making of her work before. In the 1990’s she employed several assistants 6 years of age and younger to help in the production of the Priss Room. The children’s natural taste for chaos and play added an authenticity to the installation that suggested the most mundane, and inaccurate, critique of action painting: “My child could have made that.” Here is another cliché employed to great effect: “It’s so easy, I could do it blindfolded.” Except, in Dingle’s case, the bombastic statement is apparently also true.
Born in 1951 in Pomona, CA, Dingle lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited extensively with 21 solo exhibitions including shows at the Bell Gallery at Brown University (2000), The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1996), and the Otis Gallery, Otis College of Art, Los Angeles (1995-1996). Recent group exhibitions include “Secrets and Lies,” MCA San Diego (2014) and “The Avant-Garde,” Orange County Museum of Art (2014 – 2015). Dingle was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and in “Sunshine and Noir: Art in L. A., 1960–1997,” at the Hammer Museum, which traveled to several major institutions in Europe. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Orange County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.