Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by New York based painter Chris Dorland. The opening reception will take place Saturday, December 2 from 6:00-8:00 p.m.
For his second exhibition with the gallery, Chris Dorland will be exhibiting eight new paintings and collages.
Dorland’s recent work continues to investigate architectural spaces and structures that reference utopian idealism. For this new body of work, the artist has become progressively interested in thinking about what utopia means in the 21st century.
Dorland’s project is an examination of the technological drive for progress and the obsoleteness and failure that inevitably follows. But rather than judge or condemn, his paintings aims to create a poetics out of the debris that gets left behind. His unique technique of layering scrapes and stains creates works that are consistently marked by a hauntingly beautiful atmosphere.
In addition to looking at spaces from the 1960s and 70’s, Dorland has been increasingly working from photographs he himself has taken as well as making detailed computer generated collages that infuse sources, both past and present, to create entirely new spaces.
As the effects of digital technology continue to permeate our daily lives, the role of mediated images and reproduction is taking on new meaning in Dorland’s work. For instance, this summer the artist traveled to London for an exhibition of utopian architecture and recorded images of the 3-D models using his low-resolution camera phone. He then emailed himself the jpegs, which he then used as the basis for generating new imagery.
In addition to the paintings, the gallery is pleased to present a new series of works on paper. Using photocopies and color Xeroxes as a starting point, Dorland cuts up and enlarges the image which he then puts it back together with paint and collage in effect reconstructing the original picture.
Dorland was raised in Montreal, Canada. His work was most was most recently exhibited in Turn the Beat Around at Sikkema/Jenkins and Co. as well as the Scenic curated group show 25 Bold Moves in New York. Last year he received a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant for emerging artists.