An alter ego’s wild ride
If you’ve ever felt that your job was so boring you could do it with eyes closed, you’ll know what Kim Dingle was thinking when she set out to make the 11 paintings filling one gallery of “Yipes,” her knockout exhibition in Culver City at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
Each of these 4-foot-by-31⁄2-foot oils on Plexiglas depicts Priss, a little girl Dingle invented 30 years ago as an artistic alter ego. Dressed in her Sunday best, Priss goes through the motions of growing up. Sometimes she misbehaves magnificently. At other times she conveys the stoicism of someone who knows a thing or two about pretenders, the lies they live and the hypocrisy of it all.
That fearlessness spills even more freely from the other three galleries of “Yipes.” Each is a show unto itself.
The first — and the biggest — features seven diptychs. Each consists of a framed painting that hangs on the wall and a huge sheet of glassine that has been crumpled into a wad on the floor. The wadded sheets reveal the process she followed to make the painting next to it.
First, she mounted a sheet of glassine on her studio wall and made a painting on it. Then she photographed that painting and printed it on a 5-foot-by-4-foot sheet of paper. That photograph became the underpainting for a finished work. In each simmers an intoxicating stew of past and present, photography and painting. Mistakes lead to discoveries.
Another gallery includes six oil paintings Dingle made by treating cheap sheets of particleboard as industrial strength paint-by-number sets. Filling in each irregular shape with a single color, she mocks the preciousness of much art while making paintings that let her smuggle aesthetic decisions — compositional and coloristic — into an approach that seems inhospitable to such subtlety.
Dingle seems to be making up for lost time, pushing herself — and visitors — beyond what we have seen before. That has long been Dingle’s strong suit. In “Yipes,” she doubles down. calendar@latimes.com