Chris Dorland

FIESTA AMERICANA

March 2 - April 27 2013

TOPS is pleased to present FIESTA AMERICANA, new paintings by New York City based artist Chris Dorland.

 The 7 new paintings in Fiesta Americana explore the logic of pop vernacular, the organized chaos of Internet imagery and our generalized dependency on technology for both personal and collective experiences. Dorland initially developed the underlying structures for the paintings on the computer using sourced and found images taken off the Internet as well as his own personal photographs and picture txts. The designs were then emailed to Robinson Archive Lab in Memphis, located directly above the gallery. Dan Oppenheimer at Robinson Lab printed the files onto a synthetic poly-canvas substrate, which was then mailed back to Dorland's studio in NYC. In the studio, subsequent layers and styles of painting and mark marking were added to the works before returning them to Memphis to be stretched.

 The resulting canvases function as repositories, or scaffoldings, for the visual detritus that cloud much of our mental image bank. At turns humorous and abject, Dorland employs both the metaphoric mirror (or scanner) and hammer to re-present and deconstruct the iconography of the everyday. Seemingly random snippets of visual information taken from the worlds of entertainment, advertising and manufacturing co-exist and interact with the signs and signifiers of personal subjectivity and authenticity.

The paintings compress collage, assemblage and gestural mark making onto the flatbed picture plane of the canvas in order to create a layered visual language akin to desktop computer clutter, graffiti, and ultimately abstraction.