Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce The Crystal World, an exhibition of new work by New York based painter Chris Dorland. This show is presented in cooperation with Scenic and Simon Watson and will be shown at Domestic, located at 6150 Wilshire Blvd. The show opens Saturday, April 30 and closes June 1. This will be the artist’s first time showing in Los Angeles.
Chris Dorland’s work uses architecture as a means of creating visual environments that are familiar in their reference to utopian idealism yet haunted by an eerie sense of isolation. His paintings are based on a wide range of material, which includes found images, personal memories and the artist’s own imagination. Regardless of its original source, Dorland often chooses images that trigger specific memories. To that end, he is interested in blurring the boundaries that separate what is personal from what is public.
Dorland was raised in Montreal, Canada. His work has been inspired by the leftover architecture of Expo ‘67 that still marks the city’s skyline and underscores the obsoleteness that inevitably follows the quest for progress. Many of the ideas that he addresses are inspired by what he sees as a particularly North American view of technology and optimism. The image of mankind dwarfed by human effort reoccurs throughout Dorland’s work.
For The Crystal World, the artist borrowed the title from J.G. Ballard’s 1966 novel of the same name. As in the novel, these are images of a world transformed or in the process of transformation. He offers us a number of scenes ranging from a futuristic downtown of corporate buildings to the imagined charred out remains of the US pavilion in Montreal. Chris Dorland’s work highlights the gap between our current society and that of an idealized utopian vision.