MARK DORF

> Metronom: In January 2019 you were selected for the Digital Promises Residency at the Banff Center in Canada and you worked for one month alongside faculty member Jon Rafman, Fatimah Tuggar, and Claudine Hubert. How can you describe this experience? What was your main focus of research?

Mark Dorf: My time at the Banff Centre really supplied a lightness that is hard to achieve in New York City where I currently reside. New York is a wonderful city full of vibrant communities of artists, galleries, and institutions that provide incredible inspiration, but at the same time it’s fast paced, full of noise, and at times a bit of chaos. These elements can certainly be a source of inspiration but can also become a source of distraction. By shaving away the excess sensorial experiences, I was able to really focus on the ideas that I am looking to express in my current work. The muscles that are used so unconsciously in my everyday life got a rest, the background noise was reduced, and I was then able to really hone my gestures both creatively in my work and socially in my interactions with others. It was this complementary point of view to the noise that allowed me to see the work ahead of me, but of course these two views cannot exist without one another.

 The faculty in the program, Jon Rafman, Fatimah Tuggar, and Claudine Hubert, each brought something different to the table. In addition to inviting them into the studio and discussing the work that I was making during the residency, I had many great meals with Fatimah where we discussed current social politics, insight into Claudine’s curatorial practice, while Jon hosted a series of improv workshops, both in writing and in performance, that was a study of trusting artistic gesture and subsequent reflection on gestures made.

> M: In your series “Transposition” (2016 – 2017) you worked with installation and mixed media, while in “Confluence” (2017) with digital animation. In your practice, how do you deal with the medium of video and sound? Is this new video project you are developing linking to the other medium, part of an interconnected research or a new and distinctive matter / language of Exploration?

MD: I see my practice as a single continuous strand. Despite the different projects being presented as seemingly separate, they are all within one trajectory, each borrowing from the previous while simultaneously feeding future works. Contours deals with landscape, architecture, and technology, and how they are interconnected, but now with the focus of how distinctly human all three of these notions are. Even when they are seen as being one interconnected system, the way that we see this system is still distinctly from the human point of view as we project language onto it and even create it from the ground up. It is still a system that is meant to serve humans, or at least some of them. The film looks at what exactly this means, how one might decentralize this system or move humans away from the center, but then also the melancholy of the seeming impossibility of such a shift in point of view, and even the paradox of making art about such a subject in the first place. So in a sense, the film works with familiar subject matter, but from a new angle that really looks to address language, not just spoken or written, but aesthetic as well.

> M: In all your works you deliberately feature element of fiction: your intervention through lot of Photoshop tools and gradients, the mixture of faux grass and bottled water, plywood and fake wood. It seems you recreate a ‘hyper-fictitious’ reality, in this way you are counter-current the predominant approach of hyper-reality of some contemporary figuration, that mainly implies the digital and VR. How do you deal with the urgent dichotomy of truth / fiction?

Non-fiction is not real. We all live in our own fictions as we translate our experiences and project them onto our surroundings that we interact with on an individual scale, cultural scale, and human scale. We peer through singular lenses that may share similarities with others, but are in the end unique and inescapable: in a sense, we are all in our own virtual space. It is this strange singular point that somehow shares similarities with other points that creates the spectrum I wish to reveal. In Contours, there are of course moments aesthetically that are dominated by digital intervention and collage, but predominantly, in its current state at least, it is composed of captured lens based footage with only the slightest shifts and effects. I am looking to make strange our everyday experiences through light gesture. I want us to question our surroundings that we experience so commonly creating, as you call it appropriately, a hyper-fictitious reality. 

> M: Do you have any project for the near future?
Right now I’m just working on finishing up this film. It has become a really important work to me that feels very fragile. I am considering and reflecting on each motion more so than I ever have before: trusting my motions in a subconscious way, but also reflecting on what those motions mean and why I think made them in the first place. The first introduction to this new work that has been put into the world was my recent book kin published by Silent Face Projects here in New York, which was a very exciting project — it was a bit of a teaser that gives flavors of the world I am creating in Contours. Eventually, in addition to the film, there will be both sculptural and photographic prints that are included in this new body of work that will fill out the material explorations that I think are important to the dialog that is created in the film.

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Mark Dorf (1988, Laconia – USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Mark Dorf is a New York based artist whose creative practice employs a mixture of photography, digital media, and sculpture. In his most recent work, Dorf explores society’s perceptions of and interactions with the digital domain, urban and architectural environments, and the “Natural Landscape”. With an interest in technology and science, he scrutinizes and examines the influence of the information age in order to understand our curious habitation of the 21st century. Dorf has exhibited internationally, in institutions as IFP Media Center, New York (2017); Postmasters Gallery, New York (2017 and 2015); Galerie Philine Cremer, Dusseldorf, DE (2016); Division Gallery, Toronto (2015); Outlet Gallery, Brooklyn (2015); The Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima (2014); Mobile World Centre, Barcelona (2014); Harbor Gallery, New York (2014); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2013); and Phoenix Gallery, New York (2012). Dorf’s work is included in the Fidelity Investments Collection, the Deutsche Bank Collection, Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the permanent collection of the Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2019 he won the Digital Promises Residency, at Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada.

Cover image: © Mark Dorf, Contours (video still), 2019

19/02/2019