Passing Through

Chris Dorosz

November 2008

Chris Dorosz began to regard the primacy of the paint drop, a form that takes shape not from a brush or any human-made implement or gesture, but purely from its own viscosity and the air it falls through, as analogous to the building blocks that make up the human body (DNA) or even its mimetic representation (the pixel). With this in mind he has been working towards creating a narrative of materials as the groundwork to explore changing ideas of human physicality in an age pushing towards virtual reality.

Passing Through includes new works from Dorosz’s stasis project. What at first appear to be small sculptures of figures between plates of plexiglass reveal themselves upon further examination to be paintings. Responding to the techniques of digital animation, Dorosz has constructed a field of transparent rods, upon which he has painted figures, not simply by creating the illusion of depth, but by actually reconstructing the depth-of-field. The figures are painted from all sides, so that they stand suspended in the room, somewhere between the concrete reality of sculptural objects and the spectral illusion of holograms. Through the viewer’s movements in aligning and de-aligning these pixel-like paint drops, full body portrait forms materialize and dematerialize.

In the centre of the Gallery Dorosz will suspend a much larger piece titled ‘veneer’. Differing slightly in technique from the stasis series, splotches of paint cling to a forest of vertically strung monofilament to recreate a to-scale piece of furniture – a Georgian Highboy chest of drawers.

Dorosz’ work emphasizes the beauty and tangibility of paint itself, which he considers a metaphor for human physicality. The works in the show highlight the tenuous nature of the physical world where, at any moment, life as we know it might just collapse into a pool of droplets or drift upwards into the astrosphere. The title of the exhibit ‘passing through’ underscores an impulse of transcendence in the work but also as a nod towards the vertical lines that pass through or fracture the figure.

Chris Dorosz was born in Ottawa in 1972 and raised in Winnipeg. He studied at the Concordia University in Montreal (BFA) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (MFA). Since 2000 he maintains a studio practice in San Francisco where he teaches at the Academy of Art University. Dorosz is represented by the Leo Kamen Gallery (Toronto) and the Mayberry Gallery in Winnipeg.