Gallery Crawl: “Kim Dorland: Super! Natural!” at Freight + Volume

By: Gallery Crawler

Kim Dorland, Super! Natural! oil and acrylic on wood panel, 144" x 96", 2009.

Courtesy of Freight + Volume.

The first thing that hits you when you enter Kim Dorland’s latest exhibition at Freight + Volume, “Super! Natural!” is Texture with a capital “T.” “Hefty impasto”—the rather euphemistic phrase used in the gallery literature to describe the massive gobs and six-inch-deep waves of paint that dominate Dorland’s works—doesn’t even begin to cover it. Dorland’s enthusiastically heavy-handed application of paint is bombastic; it isn’t just a device, but rather a raison d’etre. Viewing his paintings, I get the feeling that the canvases only exist to hold up the pounds of paint. It takes a lot of will power to get past the looming black pines and bulging fungi of his impasto and address the content of these new works. However, if you can shift your attention, you will be rewarded with quirky depictions of Dorland’s native Canada.

In his artist statement, Dorland explains that the exhibition title, "is an old jingle advertising the natural beauty of British Columbia...I thought it would be a nice tounge-in-cheek reference to the mythic beauty of Canada's wilderness and the history of painting the 'untamed' nature that surrounds us." The canvas you first encounter when you enter the gallery shares the exhibition's title and is easily the best example of Doland's brand of levity.

Super! Natural! is a Rousseau-esque tableau inspired by Dorland’s childhood memories of promotional posters for national parks: all forest creatures great and small gathered together in one image. He further pushes the inherent inanity of this stage-managed scene through the use of a limited color palette. The flora and the fauna look as though they have been drawn with a child’s set of crayons, except where notes of bright, neon spray paint pop out (witness the electric, kool-aid bunny in the lower left corner). Dorland shies away from explicit detail, instead depicting the forest’s occupants as seemingly hastily applied outlines filled with contrasting colors. In Super! Natural! Dorland employs his Texture to transform dark pines into storm clouds that menace our animal friends.

My knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss this work as gimmicky, fit only to be hung in an Urban Outfitters. But as I worked my way through the gallery, I found myself turning back to look at Super! Natural! again and again—and finding new things each time. Second and third glances at the painting revealed a graffiti-covered rock near the center and Molson Canadian bottles strewn throughout the forest. Rousseau would be appalled. However, the inclusion of the detritus serves to indicate, in a comic way, our (as in humanity’s) sense of ownership of our surrounding landscape.

Two other canvases hung in the main gallery riff on Dorland’s concept of the patina of human pollution spread over nature’s glory: in RIP Tom Thomson and Go Home, graffiti phrases sully the purity of pale birch trunks and in Go Home images torn from dirty magazines hang from the trees. But Nature quietly takes its revenge in both scenes. Bulbous pastel bushes or fungi crouching among the birches seem to be an opposing natural defacement of the forest—so saccharinely ugly they trump the banal scrawls. On the adjacent wall, Nature breaks into open rebellion in the person of Sasquatch. This work is my least favorite. The application of fur to the canvas, to indicate the doomed hare in the monster’s grasp, seems to be forced and expected when compared to the clever juxtaposition of tags and trees on the facing walls.

In the rear gallery, several smaller works center on a far less evocative environment, Canadian suburbia. This takes the work in a less successful direction. For example, Big Air depicts a group of teenagers standing around and watching a central figure catch “big air” as he flies on a skateboard over two cases of Dorland’s ubiquitous Molson Canadian. Dorland employs neon paint to delineate the youths’ shadows and applies his dramatic Textures to their faces and hair. Whereas in Sasquatch, the obscuring quality of the heavy application of pigment suits Big Foot’s mythic status, in Big Air, Dorland’s preoccupation with impasto renders the figures as oozing zombies. His trademark technique doesn’t add to the suburban narrative, instead it garbles and confuses the scene.

Nevertheless the forest canvases in the main gallery are well worth a look. Dorland’s cheeky and substantive paintings are a fresh addition to the nature painting cannon that he pokes fun at.

“Kim Dorland: Super! Natural!” at Freight + Volume runs through June 25^th

Freight + Volume

542 West 24^th Street

Take the C or E train to 23^rd Street and/or the M23 bus to 23^rd and 10^th Avenue

Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat, 11 am to 6pm

Gallery Website: www.freightandvolume.com

Artist Website: www.kimdoralnd.com

Watch an Interview with Dorland:

http://www.vimeo.com/1569492?pg=embed&sec=1569492