Art News

Jim Dingilian’s first solo museum exhibition opens at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

RIDGEFIELD, CT.- For the past decade, Jim Dingilian has developed a body of work in which he skillfully renders ephemeral imagery by hand on found objects. The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present his first solo museum exhibition, Subtractive Images, from 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. 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 graphi