Smoke Art in Bottles by Jim Dingilian

Over the course of the past decade, American artist Jim Dingilian has developed a body of work in which he painstakingly renders ephemeral imagery by hand on found objects such as wooden desktops and aluminum soda cans, and particularly the impressive artwork he does inside discarded bottles.

Jim Dingilian collects empty glass bottles and smokes their interiors with candle soot. After laying a coat of soot on the lining of the bottles, he goes through a process of delicate scraping to depict meticulous landscapes.

“The miniature scenes I depict are of locations on the edge of suburbia which seem mysterious or even slightly menacing despite their commonplace nature”, Jim Dingilian says. “The bottles add to the implied narratives of transgression. When found by the sides of roads or in the weeds near the edges of parking lots, empty liquor bottles are artifacts of consumption, delight, or dread. As art objects, they become hourglasses of sorts, their drained interiors now inhabited by dim memories.”

Dingilian's bottles are currently on display at two exhibition spaces. They can be viewed as part of the group series entitled Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design at The Museum of Arts at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York until August 12, 2012 and at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, under the exhibit title Subtractive Images, until June 10, 2012.

Source : http://www.amusingplanet.com