Surface surface (hey mr. goat)

RandallScottProjects is pleased to present surface surface (hey mr. goat) a two-person exhibition by New York based artists Chris Dorland and Joe Pflieger.

The title of the show serves as a linguistic flattening, or rasterization*, of a number of the interests that preoccupy both Dorland's and Pfleiger's work. Formally trained in painting, the artists' exploration of surface, both materially and conceptually, continues to be a driving force in their practices even though printing technologies, photography and digital manipulation increasingly replaces the use of brushes to create pictorial representations. Surface is also a reference to the Microsoft tablet Surface- a lackluster competitor in the race for hand-held computing devices. The market performance of the Surface tablet is an apt metaphor for the all too real consequences of technological failure and the difficulties of thriving in a crowded market place where obsolescence is only a few bad quarters away.

Dorland will be presenting a suite of paintings from his Scanners series. This body of work, started in 2014, is an extension of his longstanding interest in reproduction, consumer society and waste. Using inkjet prints of scanned and recycled imagery from past work as well as commercial stock photography, the paintings are constructed using the logic of algorithmic inputs and outputs. Visual information is paired with art historically loaded materials (linen, primed canvas, commercial nylon, painter's drop clothes); images are processed, filtered and repurposed, printed, sewn and stitched together both digitally and literally before being framed by their stretcher bars. These paintings are simultaneously hyper-flexible (abstract) and hyper-representational, creating semiotic space upon which the history of painting can be grafted, compressed, organized, expressed and re-expressed infinitely; creating new languages with which to consider the digital afterlife of painting in a post humanist world.

 Pflieger's work addresses the fluidity of images and the abstraction of institutional power. Pflieger will be presenting a series of photographs as well as new works exploring the hybrid space created by the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture; a series of abstracted and melancholic photographs taken in Arizona at both the Biosphere 2 as well as at ancient Anasazi ruins will be juxtaposed onto free-standing reflective sculptural screens. Temporary images are generated as a result of the transitional, reflective spaces created by the material themselves - an apt metaphor for the constant re-calibration required to negotiate a relationship with the shifting meaning inherent in his photographic subjects (science, hope, future technologies, lost knowledge, the end of times). Meaning is contorted and challenged as the boundaries between image, object, reflection and medium elude stable ground.

Chris Dorland has exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, The Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, White Flag Projects, St-Louis, MO, The Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY and The Suburban, Oak Park, IL as well as at commercial galleries. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum. Dorland has produced public projects with Art Production Fund, the New Museum, and Julliard School of Music.

Joe Pflieger received a MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work has recently been exhibited in a solo exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery, New York City and PLHK Gallery, Chicago, IL and as well in group exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI,The Suburban, Chicago, IL and a two-person exhibitions at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL and Light and Sie, Dallas, TX.

 
*rasterization is a command used in image editing programs like Photoshop to compress, and discard, multiple working layers, creating one flat layer that is functionally opaque