Chris DorlandCA/US
Chris Dorland (Canada/USA) works at the intersection of painting and digital media. With an emphasis on examining the ways in which surveillance technologies perceive, record and reproduce reality, Dorland uses a variety of screens, drones and other optical devices to explore the increasingly tenuous boundaries between physical and digital environments, actual and virtual realities. Dorland has been developing and refining a unique compression of both analog and digital languages into a singular and dense aesthetic rife with both unexpected beauty and extreme chaos.
Neither fully abstract nor functionally representational, Dorland's work allows us to apprehend the force of intrusive technologies as they increasingly distort and glitch our understanding of reality. Dorland’s paintings and videos are a haunting meditation on contemporary life that evokes a dystopian vision of the human-built world through the sublimated violence of abstraction, consumerism and technology.
untitled (graveyard daemon) - NFT, 2021
For the past year Dorland has been experimenting with and developing a new series of video works that uses GAN technology as a starting point. Dorland's Daemon works often contrast a central cell-like shape that is part egg, part creature, part abstract fluid against a gridded matrix-like environment that references simulated spaces and CGI environments. In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. In Dorland's work, his Daemons take on a quasi sentient role as embodied little creatures or gatekeepers that navigate and wander the metaverse.
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