David Mark Wise

Chris Dorland has been painting utopian architecture for several years now, creating pictures that indulge in gorgeously threatening baroque colorations, and that have a strange Piranesi-like splendor. And like most commercial architects’ renderings, they have those tiny little token people often seen going about their business—but in Dorland’s work the little people evoke dread, fear, fleeing crowds. Rhona Hoffman is showing a variation on this body of work in a series of "Simulations." Appropriated photos are collaged and then painted, painstakingly, in the manner of Gerhard Richter. Complex arrangements of rectangular panels are painted in corrosive colors and bleached images. To call this series of paintings "simulations" nods to Baudrillard’s book of the same name, but this is not a recycled, art-school postmodernism; something different is going on here. These pictures have the aura of a performance, of technical experiments or tests. It is as if the artist has achieved Warhol’s desire of becoming a machine, and we are in the presence of some parody of the occult technical processes that lie behind the everyday world.

Chris Dorland, "Simulations," shows at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, through May 30. (2008-05-06)

Also by David Mark Wise

Eye Exam
Kirsten Leenaars’ "Travelogue of a Stationary Dreamer" is a fragile and vulnerable video installation now showing at the Contemporary Art Workshop (CAW), a space that always seems about to be swallowed up, even though the CAW has been around for decades. It is the first video installation CAW has mounted in its fifty-eight-year history, and the space is well-suited to the demanding—and rewarding—act of meditation that Leenaars’ work demands
(2008-04-15)

Tip of the Week
Ed Paschke once described his work as "translation"—appropriating photos and other imagery from popular culture, and transforming them into his own idiom. His work is marked everywhere by an engagement with the world of photomechanically reproduced images, like those of photography, movies and television
(2008-04-08)

Tip of the Week
The career of James Bishop coincides with the great movements of Modernist painting in the last fifty years, but he never aligned with any of the strong personalities or dogmas from that era
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
"Snooping for a New Lexis of Peace" is an attempt to discover a new vocabulary of imagery relating to recent U.S.-led military adventures. A lot of people have questioned the lack of "oppositional practices" in American art today—there is, unfortunately, only one Paul Chan—and so this experiment of James J. Peterson is timely. But this artist goes in a direction that is totally counterintuitive
(2008-03-18)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-05)

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