Jim Dingilian at McKenzie - New York - exhibition of the artist's work

For his first New York solo exhibition, Jim Dingilian purchased thrift shop silver-plated dishes and trays, polished them and coated them with candle smoke. He then conjured meticulous tableaux of nostalgic interiors and populated landscapes by removing the unwanted smoke with Q-tips, toothpicks and pins. Existing scratches, monograms, even the copper base metal of the dishes remain visible and become an independent complex of marks that float alternatively before or behind the plane of the smoke drawings. He has transformed these overlooked discards into miniatures of intimate beauty and repose.

Dingilian can draw (or dust) exceedingly well and creates believable worlds for us to enter. The pieces are sealed in Plexiglas boxes which will retard their oxidation, but they will eventually blacken, as is silver's destiny. We also know that the image can be obliterated by one careless finger's touch. Dingilian lavishes his full attention and skill on a vulnerable object with a definitive shelf life, creating an all too appropriate metaphor for the fragility and unpredictability of our contemporary condition.

Even though they are hand drawn, we gaze at these works the way we would at early photographs. Shifting from side to side so that the silver can catch the light, we locate the one viewing position that transforms them into tonal images the way a daguerreotype suddenly shifts from reflective mirror to portrait.

The scenes that Dingilian chooses are nostalgic reveries. They often feel like Victorian curiosities. When they are more contemporary, a disorienting detail always seems to derail any specificity. There are recurring elements: a luminous grove, a Colonial highboy and balloon-back chair, bodies of water, figures calling to each other over great distances. We perceive these scenes like barely recalled memories. We wonder what these captured moments are intended to tell us. Clues abound, but definitive meaning is elusive.

It is tantalizing to picture what the smoke imagery will look like against fully oxidized silver, and to guess whether the depictions will even be readable. The ambiguity of the images and the eventual discoloration of the silver are perfectly matched in this sensitive body of work. The pieces reside for now as strange poems, locked in their Plexiglas boxes, evocative as dreams, vulnerable as mayflies.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group