The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presents Jim Dingilian. Subtractive Images an exhibition on view January 29 to June 10, 2012, bringing together three series of works in which the artist has utilized modification by subtraction to produce optically realistic representations.
Jim Dingilian,The Unexpected Signal, 2011 Courtesy of the artist and McKenzie Fine Art, New York
The earliest series, ongoing since 2001, is of landscape drawings made on found school desktops. These were followed in 2007 by a series, continued to the present, of landscape drawings rendered on the smoked interior surfaces of glass bottles. The newest series, begun in 2011, presents figurative “portraits” pointedly resembling daguerreotypes, made of manipulated aluminum beverage cans. What they all have in common is the painstaking removal of material—respectively graphite, soot, and metal—in the process utilized to render their imagery.
Curator Richard Klein explains, “Dingilian has made the marginal, man-made landscape environments at the edges of American suburbia his primary subject matter. There he finds not just the sprawl of highways, parking lots, and weedy no-man’s lands, but also the debris of the surrounding civilization: beer cans, empty liquor bottles, and abandoned cars and furniture.”
Klein continues, “Dingilian’s work, although sharing connections with romantic nineteenth century landscape painting, doesn’t depict spiritual exaltation, but rather a more melancholic view of human experience. Haunted by a sense of nostalgia and loss, it is not simply sentimental, but rather quietly foreboding. ”
The newest work in this exhibition, The Unexpected Signal, is the first multi-bottle piece completed by the artist, composed of a total of eleven bottles. Although each bottle contains an individual vignette carefully scraped from the soot-coated glass interior, Dingilian merged the separate images to create an ambitious panoramic view that sweeps from a shaded wooded area to an urban streetscape.
Found Opening: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will celebrate the opening of Jim Dingilian: Subtractive Images along with five other Found exhibitions—by artists who work with appropriated ideas and salvaged materials—at a reception for the artists on Sunday, January 29, 2012, from 3 to 5 pm ($7 adults; $4 seniors; FREE for members, pre-K–12 teachers, and children 18 and under). Prior to the reception the Museum will host a panel from 2 to 3 pm where artists Barrão, Jim Dingilian, Roy McMakin, and Kathryn Spence will discuss their relationships with the found objects central to their work. Onsite parking is available, as is direct round-trip transportation from New York City. Reserve your seat on the January 29 Aldrich shuttle, now leaving from a new location; please consult aldrichart.org for particulars.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877
Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org