NYAB Event - Josh Dorman "Lost Divers"

Josh Dorman "Lost Divers"

RYAN LEE

This event has ended.

Mary Ryan Gallery presents Lost Divers, Josh Dorman’s third solo exhibition at the Gallery. This exhibition includes new paintings on wood pane that combine Dorman’s unique mix of ink, acrylic and collage over antique paper. Dorman’s use of weathered bits of collage material—all prephotography, generally engravings from antiquarian books and manuals—allows his work to exist somewhere between the past and present, and often in both at once. This sense of dislocation in time is essential to Dorman whose influences range from Bosch and Sassetta to Andrew Bird and Italo Calvino.

Dorman has always been interested in dualities, contradictions, and simultaneous realities. In his work, “Time shifts constantly, moves backwards, ceases. Space and scale are also unfixed: cities can be microscopic, paper-thin. They can mirror themselves underground; they can be inhabited by the dead,” says Dorman. “My primary goal is to create worlds that are utterly specific and completely open.”

True to form, Dorman’s newest paintings offer infinite suggestions to their meanings and no explanation. The title “Lost Divers” hints at both purposeful exploration and accidental disappearance. Divers, many of which can be found hidden or plainly exposed in the works in this exhibition, are suspended between worlds, moving through atmospheres, and fraught with potential. The engravings of divers come from an antiquarian book on swimming and diving techniques and a Russian scuba manual from the 1940s.

In recent paintings, Dorman has begun to collage in his own finely detailed graphite drawings, adding yet another facet to his kaleidoscopic images. Dorman works on the small drawings in an automatic fashion, moving from left to right across the paper without any initial sketch. In The Big Picture Show, the graphite drawing takes center stage. Illuminated by searchlights, it functions as both a billboard and movie screen, in what seems to be an otherworldly theater-laboratory hybrid. Whether man, beast, or machine is running the show is not clear

[Image: Josh Dorman "The Big Picture Show" (2011) Ink, acrylic, graphite and antique paper on panel, 34 x 33 in.]