Mark Dorf "Environmental Occupations"
Phoenix Gallery
This event has ended.
Mark Dorf is a photographer and sculptor who seeks to examine humanity’s relationship between its internal and external environments. By re-contextualizing moment and symbol through photography and image capture, he creates new meaning within the immediate environment. Mark looks to understand humanity as an observer in his surroundings, using images as a tool to explore our curious habitation of the world around us.
Environmental Occupations is Mark’s second solo exhibition. The exhibit consists of thirteen photographs that explore humanity’s roll of creation and its relationship with the landscape. The concrete forms seen in the images, influenced by minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Richard Serra, downplay any sort of expression and instead reference nothing but geometry and the dense substance that they are composed of. The aggressive shape, material, and imposing presence of the objects contrast greatly against the natural and harmonious landscapes in which they are found, thus rendering them out of context and providing a skewed image from what is inherently interpreted as real. The question arises, where did these forms originate? Was there a creator? What is the function?
Though these forms seem to mimic functional urban horizons, they are in fact useless and loom in the landscape with a quiet devastation. The forms look to have been man made, but their sheer size and lack of evidence of construction leave the viewer with disconnect between a specific creator and the objects at hand – just as we see in our mass produced urban world today. The figures in the images interact with the forms in an attempt to understand the occupancy of the odd structures and explore their power from a neutral and seemingly omnipotent standpoint. MARK DORF is the 2012 Phoenix Gallery’s Young Emerging Artist Winner: Jurors: Sue Stoffel, Collector, Arts Administrator and Rene Vara, Curator. www.dorfphoto.net
[Image: Mark Dorf TIME (2011) Archival Pigment Print']
Media
Schedule
from October 03, 2012 to October 27, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-10-04 from 18:00 to 20:00