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John Wayne Cookie Jars, Jesus Rag Dolls, Ed Sullivan as a Young Girl
and Abraham Lincoln's Leg. These are four of the amusing and disturbing
works that Kim Dingle has created over the past ten years. In one way
or another, and often with immense, dark humor, Dingle's art illuminates
the role that race, gender, stereotype, and myth play in defining identity.
This exhibition presents a survey of Dingle's work with particular emphasis
on her rambunctious and sometimes violent alter-egos, Priss and the
Wild Girls.
Dingle's early works display a loopy interest in portraiture. Her first
solo exhibition was entitled "Portraits from the Dingle Library."
In George Washington as Cram Dingle as Queen Elizabeth, 1990,
and Baby Cram Dingle as George Foreman, 1991, the artist combined
the image of her mother, Cram, with powerful personages–a president,
a queen, a champion boxer–thereby empowering her by association.
Witty and irreverent, the paintings also point to the arbitrary nature
of our concepts of sexual identity. Dingle's discussion of the paintings
is more straightforward and amusing: she points out that her mother
believes that she is related to both George Washington and Queen Elizabeth
and that the reference to Foreman came after the painting was completed,
when she noticed the similarity between Cram and George's physiognomy.
Kim Dingle grew up in California in the 1950s. Her best known works–paintings
of little girls in frilly "Easter Sunday" dresses–do
not, however, reflect the innocence of the 50s or the smiling darlings
of TV sitcoms and family snapshots. More often than not, Dingle's girls
clench their fists and furrow their brows as they pummel each other
with dolls, wrestle around on the floor, or chase one another with weapons
drawn. Painted in a cartoony and energetic style, the works convey the
fun of rebellion and the joy of being mischievously and unapologetically
oneself.
Dingle often inserts her little girls into scenes traditionally occupied
by males. The mythic American West of Hollywood movies and Remington
paintings provides the backdrop for the Wild Girl series of 1992—93.
In two more recent works historic scenes of patriotism are recast with
female protagonists: Untitled (Hatchet), 1998, recalls the tale
of George Washington and the cherry tree, while Untitled (Girls with
the dresspole) mimics the composition drawn from the Iwo Jima Memorial
of figures raising a flag.
The action of Dingle's paintings is transferred into three-dimensions
in Priss Room. The 1995 installation presents the viewer with
a nursery in chaos. Stuffed toys lay shredded and mutilated on the floor.
The sweetly decorated wallpaper is covered with wild scribbles and smears
of unidentified substances, and the furniture has been demolished. The
perpetrators of this disarray stand defiantly in their crib: two little
girls–one black, the other white–both named Priss. Feet firmly
planted, fists clenched, with bushy hair made from steel wool, and a
grimace that would stop a Mack truck, they stand wearing white ruffled
dresses and laced-edged socks that have somehow remained clean throughout
the ordeal. They are made of hand-painted porcelain, and as the artist
points out, they are tough but also vulnerable.
Priss and the Wild Girls are modeled after Wadow Dingle, the artist's
niece. Born with brain damage, Wadow was prone to violent outbursts
as a child. According to Dingle, "She was always wearing really
frilly lavender-type Easter Sunday dresses. With this tumbleweed head
and this enormously violent and volatile energy in her. She was otherwise
the picture of femininity." Dingle is quick to point out the wild
girls are also self-portraits. "I am a violent person. Not physically,
but that violence is in me, that rage. Those children are me."
Works in the exhibition were generously lent from the collections of
Eileen and Peter Norton of Santa Monica, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg
of Scarsdale, and the artist.
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