Super Dakota

Synthetic Skin consists of a new body of work including five Alumacore panels, a Soft Skin painting, two screen based video works as well as a site specific installation.

Dorland’s work addresses our evolving relationship to technology and the body. Neither fully abstract nor functionally representational, Dorland’s work allows us to apprehend the force of intrusive technologies as they merge into our bodies and psyches. Seen as a whole, Synthetic Skin takes over the gallery like an invasive machine that one must enter. Temporary steel studs walls cut up and divide the space, creating machine like barriers that one must physically respond to as one experiences the exhibition.

Working from a combination of found and self-generated content, Dorland mediates the flow of visual information through various machines and filtering processes. Working from drone footage, music videos, advertisements, violent first-person shooter games and as well as material the artist films wandering the city streets at night, Dorland’s work contains threatening elements of glitch, randomness and corporatized desire. Stretching, fragmentation, and other failures to properly scan result into a hectic and corrupted machine made language that is as violent and inhumane as it is unnerving and beautiful. Describing his studio as both a laboratory and junkyard for outdated and obsolete technology, Dorland characterizes his role as that of a technician, or assistant, to his various machines, as he facilitates the intake and outputting of visual information into alien new images.

The mechanism of vision, both human and machine, becomes the subject of Dorland’s work as the viewer vacillates between cognition and confusion, contributing to fraught questions of perception and reality.

In conjunction to the exhibition, we are very pleased to announce the launch of the arttist’s book Full Walkthrough 1 : 1 x 4 published by RRose Editions and available at the gallery.

Read the essay written by Eli Kerr about the show (http://www.superdakota.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/media-exhausts-hardware-_-eli-kerr-for-chris-dorland-sythenthic-skin_2019-copy.pdf)

Chris Dorland (b. 1978, Montreal) lives and works in New York City. His work has most recently been exhibited in FRONT INTERNATIONAL: The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Lyles & King, NY, Nicoletti Contemporary, London, The PIT, LA. He has exhibited in galleries such as Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; and Neuberger Museum of Art, New York among others.