Chris Dorland

Chris Dorland’s second exhibition at Lyles & King showcases new work that bridges aesthetic languages to examine the contradictions of technology’s fetish for progress.

In “New Day,” Dorland combines the digital and the analog through a series of large scale paintings and data-driven video works that vacillate between abstracted blurs and high-res images. His compositions put complex topographic renderings side by side with the clutter of day-to-day digital life. 

Dorland’s video Untitled (species II) (2020) plays on a loop, projecting what appears to be a grid or a cage that encases a burgeoning form. The work uses GAN machine learning to generate models that then become images and animations, bringing to life a digital creature within a digital womb. The video’s imagery finds a mirror in Dorland’s hyperreal painting Untitled (instinct mode) (2020), which makes use of the same projection, this time setting it against a chaotic backdrop of fragmented computer screens, file folders, camera displays, and other pixelated forms. Both abstract and detailed, Dorland’s work seeks to collapse paint and digital language into a single indistinguishable medium.