Super Dakota is pleased to present Synthetic Skin, the gallery’s second exhibition with New York based artist Chris Dorland. Synthetic Skin consists of a new body of work including fve Alumacore panels, a Soft Skin painting, two screen based video works as well as a site specifc 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 fow of visual information through various machines and fltering processes. Working from drone footage, music videos, advertisements, violent frst-person shooter games and as well as material the artist flms wandering the city streets at night, Dorland’s work contains threat-ening elements of glitch, randomness and corporatized desire. Stretching, fragmentation, and other failures to properly scan result into a hectic and corrupted machine made lan-guage 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 Describing his studio as both a laboratory and junkyard for outdated and obsolete technology, Dorland character-izes his role as that of a technician, or assistant, to his various machines, as he facilitates the intake and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 ques-tions of perception and reality.

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

Please inquire at contact@superdakota.com

Read the essay written by Eli Kerr about the show

Chris Dorland (b. 1978, Montreal) lives and works in New York City. His work has most re-cently been exhibited in FRONT INTERNATIONAL: The Cleveland Triennial for Contempo-rary 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.

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Press:

THE NEW ORDER | http://thenewordermag.com/tno/a-conversation-with-chrisdorland

Art Viewer | https://artviewer.org/chris-dorland-at-lyles-king/

Copengahen Contemporary | http://copenhagen-contemporary.dk/chris-dorland-qa-with-chris-dorland/

Hunted Projects | http://www.huntedprojects.com/practisechrisdorland/