Happiness Machines

Super Dakota is pleased to present Happiness Machines, an exhibition by New York based  APT artist Chris Dorland. This will be his first one person exhibition in Europe.

“Happiness Machines” brings together 12 paintings and a new video from his Scanners series. These works incorporate a method of inkjet printing and fabric sewing to create large format paintings that are at once digital and highly physical continuing the artist’s on-going investigation of consumer space and the contradictions of 21st century life.

The Scanners works developed from a series of computer collages the artist began in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. As the global financial system teetered on the edge of disaster, the artist became acutely aware of the mechanism and ideological structure of western capitalist logic and the immense power that it held over him. Dorland began to see numerous ways in which his own subjectivity and belief system; his belief in the American Dream, had in a large part been designed by corporations, media and advertising, and that he had spent a large part of his life happily, and unknowingly, consuming a system of codes and signs as they shaped his life and goals. Using the printer and scanner to respond and interact with speed and directness, Dorland began feeding advertisements from architectural and lifestyle magazines that lay around the studio, overprinting them with doodles and color blocks, juxtaposing and overlapping images in often funny and unexpected ways. Through chaotic and surprising combinations, the ridiculousness and absurdity of the highly produced advertisements exposed an underlying logic of consumption and manipulation that lay beneath the surface of the otherwise seemingly benign and trivial ads.

For the latest works, as the title implies, the scanner as a tool for painting is taking center stage, as images are processed and distorted by glitches in the machine as the scanner both reproduces and degrades found and appropriated images from stock advertising, past works from Dorland’s archives and magazine images both current and past. The language and syntax of consumer images is explored and manipulated as is the history of painting itself. Post-war painting, and it’s new found status as a luxury object and investment, can be seen making it’s way into Dorland’s vocabulary as these new works compress and reference the history of painting over the last 70 years. Arte Povera, minimalism, pop art, abstraction are all content to be consumed by Dorland’s new works as are the distorted and hallucinatory images and reproductions that feed the hall of mirrors that constitutes our collective dreams.