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JOSH DORMAN: NEW WORKS
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7th, 5 - 8pm September 7 - October 12, 2019 |
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
The Gallery is pleased to present Josh Dorman: New Works. The exhibition features the artist’s new body of mixed media works and continues through October 12th, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 7th, from 5-8pm.
Dorman describes his works, "I want to know how the past lives in the present. When I use cut-outs from old books and maps, I’m aware that their meaning is from another time period, so that meaning therefore lives in an altered way in a contemporary context. What does this engraving of the gears of a cotton gin mean to us now? And what happens in our eyes and minds when it’s paired with the spiral forms from a diagram of the cell structure of the cotton plant? What does an 1890 map fragment mean in a world where we have GPS? These physical paper artifacts are folded into who we are now, yet we are forgetting our connection to them. I am constantly foraging for peculiar old books—like a hunter, or a botanist. I find disused knowledge in diagrams, charts, engravings, antique textbooks. Part of my goal is to make people see the value of old printed imagery, which depended for its existence on the filter of a human mind and hand, rather than on the camera lens.
By recontextualizing these antique images within drawn and painted worlds, I aim to generate paintings that feel dislocated in time. I generate fields of visual detritus, then bury and excavate, wander between flesh, feather, metal, bone, rock. Living ferns stain skeletal fractal forms on old maps. Gears, mushrooms, coronae and cells mesh, echo, power machines or hover weightless.
The worlds of form and image that I create have an internal logic, like a poem or novel. There are visual rhymes and dozens of narratives, but I do not prescribe a single reading. My aim is for the paintings to be simultaneously hyper-specific and completely open-ended."
Josh Dorman received his MFA from Queen's College in Flushing, New York. Dorman has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Minneapolis Academy of Art Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art and The Naples Museum. Dorman's work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Art Forum, ArtNews, The Paris Review, and the New York Times among other publications. Dorman lives and works in New York City.
Dorman describes his works, "I want to know how the past lives in the present. When I use cut-outs from old books and maps, I’m aware that their meaning is from another time period, so that meaning therefore lives in an altered way in a contemporary context. What does this engraving of the gears of a cotton gin mean to us now? And what happens in our eyes and minds when it’s paired with the spiral forms from a diagram of the cell structure of the cotton plant? What does an 1890 map fragment mean in a world where we have GPS? These physical paper artifacts are folded into who we are now, yet we are forgetting our connection to them. I am constantly foraging for peculiar old books—like a hunter, or a botanist. I find disused knowledge in diagrams, charts, engravings, antique textbooks. Part of my goal is to make people see the value of old printed imagery, which depended for its existence on the filter of a human mind and hand, rather than on the camera lens.
By recontextualizing these antique images within drawn and painted worlds, I aim to generate paintings that feel dislocated in time. I generate fields of visual detritus, then bury and excavate, wander between flesh, feather, metal, bone, rock. Living ferns stain skeletal fractal forms on old maps. Gears, mushrooms, coronae and cells mesh, echo, power machines or hover weightless.
The worlds of form and image that I create have an internal logic, like a poem or novel. There are visual rhymes and dozens of narratives, but I do not prescribe a single reading. My aim is for the paintings to be simultaneously hyper-specific and completely open-ended."
Josh Dorman received his MFA from Queen's College in Flushing, New York. Dorman has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Minneapolis Academy of Art Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art and The Naples Museum. Dorman's work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Art Forum, ArtNews, The Paris Review, and the New York Times among other publications. Dorman lives and works in New York City.
Billis Williams Gallery opened as George Billis Gallery Los Angeles in 2004. Tressa Williams joined as director in 2009 and became partner in 2021. Billis Williams Gallery builds on the Billis legacy and shows emerging to mid-career artists with a special focus on Southern California painters. The gallery is dedicated to exhibiting exceptional work in richly varied visual vocabularies ranging from abstraction to photorealism.
Billis Williams Gallery
2716 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
[email protected]
www.BillisWilliams.com
Billis Williams Gallery
2716 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
[email protected]
www.BillisWilliams.com