Mayhem, Mischief & Little Girls : Art: Kim Dingle’s manipulated photos criticize a society that forces kids to grow up too quickly.

Mayhem and mischief have been on Los Angeles artist Kim Dingle’s mind for the past few years. They’ve also played a big part in her work, ever since she started retouching photographs of smiling baby girls by arming them with guns, daggers and boxing gloves.

As if to give these infants a fighting chance in a ruthless world, Dingle’s manipulated photos also emphasize that modern society forces kids to grow up too quickly. Although this sort of feminist critique has become a fashionable aspect of contemporary art, Dingle’s version stands out because it’s charming, dark and hilariously funny.

Four years ago, she painted a portrait of her mother as a plump, cherubic baby whose furrowed brow, crossed eyes and clenched fists made her resemble George Foreman, the current heavy-weight champ. Another lusciously painted portrait, “George Washington as Cram Dingle as Queen Elizabeth,” depicted her mother as a stiff-lipped, home-grown patriarch who could not tell a lie, and as a dignified foreign queen whose regal mouth seemed to be about to break into a smirk.

Asked about the degree to which fiction enters her art, Dingle, 43, stated flatly, “There is no fiction. Cram Dingle is George Washington as Queen Elizabeth as Cram Dingle, in whatever order. That is who Cram Dingle is. Those are the archetypes of Cram Dingle’s psyche. It’s very important to her. In this family, we don’t need to make up much.”

Following these group portraits depicting only one sitter, Dingle began a series of “Wild Girl” paintings, in which swarming hordes of perfectly horrid little girls, decked out in frilly dresses or stark naked, pummel one another with chaotic abandon, punching, poking, biting, stabbing, shooting, choking and squashing.

In her typically matter-of-fact tone, Dingle explains, “I am a very violent person. Not physically, but the violence, the rage in my pictures is in me. All of those children are me, the ones suffering and the ones inflicting pain. I am them. If you notice, those kids are not bloody or gory. You don’t see dead children. You don’t see any guts or blood or severed limbs. You just see action, a lot of action.”

Refreshingly free of intellectual posturing and political agendas, Dingle’s work feels as if it’s made from the inside out, from what she knows in her bones but can’t put into words.

“I’ve been an artist since I was a baby. My art is about my inner life, and the pain of it. It’s about the very painful process of being alive. By nature I am not an overtly political artist. I know that everything is political, that everything is politicized. But . . . I don’t work at that level.”

At once dumb and direct, Dingle’s paintings are also animated by a quirky exuberance that suggests they’re made by a true eccentric, by someone who has an uncanny knack for revealing how weird normalcy is, when you really get down to thinking about it.

“The fact that we walk around . . . and eat and breathe and have ideas and don’t need any batteries or cords is just amazing to me,” Dingle says. “I mean, what keeps us moving? I’m in awe of it. I’ll hold my dog up and turn him around and look for the place where you put in the batteries. What makes him go? And we’re made of the same stuff.”

Such wacky insights reach a feverish pitch in Dingle’s newest piece, a tour-de-force installation that was shown last month at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, and is now at Blum & Poe Gallery in Santa Monica. Walking into the room, which has been totally transformed into a life-size nursery, is like stumbling into a crime-scene while the crime is still in progress.

Foot-long darts stick out of the wallpapered walls, the lowest third of which have been smeared with oil paint, greasy little handprints and crayon scrawlings. (Dingle commissioned her 2 1/2-year-old neighbor, Annabelle Larsen Crowley, to make these furious, abstract scribbles that have none of the facile elegance of Cy Twombly’s similar gestures on canvas.) Crumpled scraps of newspapers, stained diapers and dozens of ripped apart stuffed animals litter the floor.

All of this chaos seems to have been caused by four defiant, nearly demonic girl mannequins. Dressed in their Sunday finest and at the peak of the Terrible Twos, they stand with clenched fists in cribs or on the floor, staring you right in the eye as you pause in the entrance.

It is as if one of Dingle’s “Wild Girl” paintings has been realized in three dimensions and you’ve entered it, frozen for an eerie, uncharacteristically calm moment, just before the four girls, each named (or titled) “Priss,” resume their destructive frenzy.

Their ferocious demeanors suggest that the violence they have done to the nursery in which they’re incarcerated is not nearly as intense as the violence that’s regularly done to children as they are transformed from anarchic bundles of energy into polite and respectable citizens.

“Priss is like Shirley Temple as a psycho pit bull,” says Dingle of her figures whose facial expressions are wise beyond their years. Priss is also a portrait of the artist as a stubborn child who has somehow managed to grow up without losing touch with her irrepressible--yet hardly innocent--urges.

The amoral impulses of little girls at their most horrible not only survive but are alive and kicking in Dingle’s installation. “I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to psychoanalyze everything. I’m not in therapy, but I’m really feeling alive and real. And I like myself. I mean, I like me. And I do have fun with my art, and it’s very serious.”

* Blum & Poe, Broadway Gallery Complex, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311. Through March 4.