Mark Dorf

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Mark Dorf is a New York based artist whose practice utilizes photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. In his most recent work, Dorf is influenced by human’s perceptions of and interactions with what we call “Nature”, urbanism, design, and virtual environments. As opposed to seeing these subjects as categorically separate, Dorf reveals their entanglement and integration with one another as an inclusive and lively planetary ecology. Being both self-aware and critical of their own means of production, Dorf’s works craft a vision of a more inclusive future both ecologically and socially, helping to navigate away from environmental collapse in the Anthropocene and imagine a New Nature.

Dorf has exhibited widely both domestically and internationally at the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, 2020; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, FR, 2020; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, FR, 2019; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, DE, 2018; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, NL, 2020, 2017; Postmasters Gallery, New York, 2017, 2015; Division Gallery, Toronto, CA, 2015; The Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru, 2014; Mobile World Centre, Barcelona, ES, 2014; and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 2013 amongst many others. Dorf’s work is included in the Foam Photography Museum Permanent Collection, the Fidelity Investments Collection, and the Deutsche Bank Collection, amongst others. Dorf’s books are housed in libraries across the world such as The Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University, and the Avery Library at Columbia University.

View VII

Animated GIF
800 x 600 px, 24fps
128 Colors
2021

The works from Mark Dorf’s series The Way We’ve Always Seen uncover connections between technology, design, urbanism, and what is commonly considered “Nature”—connections that have always existed in symbiosis, but are rarely recognized as reality.

View VII gently pulls the viewer in and out of a mountainside steeped in blue and purple with a slow zoom. This zoom sits in contrast not only to the speed of global technological culture, but also to that of the bar at the bottom of the composition that strongly resembles a loading animation. The bar itself never resolves and is forever stuck in perpetual motion as though whatever it is signifying that it is loading is also forever unresolved.

This lack of resolve suggests the idea of forever being in a state of becoming—the constant flow of material, form, emotion, and knowledge between what is commonly called the “Natural World” and that of the Technological, is never in its final form: it is constantly in a state of transformation. The subtle and deceivingly simple relationships between the visual forms in View VII suggest a symbiosis that is essential to a paradigm shift in thought required to create a more fruitful future for the planet on which we live.

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Resolution

Animated GIF
800 x 600 px, 24fps
128 Colors
2022

The works from Mark Dorf’s series The Way We’ve Always Seen uncover connections between technology, design, urbanism, and what is commonly considered “Nature”—connections that have always existed in symbiosis, but are rarely recognized as reality.

In Resolution, the viewer is met with a black and white mountainous scene whose contours drip with color aberrations. This disruption lays bare the false dichotomy of black and white, and by extension, the false dichotomy of technology and what is considered the “Natural World”. Within the digital space, even images of black and white are built by pixels of red, green, and blue. In Resolution, this acts as a metaphor for the multitude contained within individuals and the complex spectrum of knowledge and experience that we all exist within.

Complicating this notion of the spectrum is the graphic form—a resolution target used to calibrate camera sensors and scanners—that consistently appears and disappears in varying scales throughout the duration of the animation. It flickers as though it cannot lock onto its target; In this moment, technology is failing; It cannot quantify the image that it finds itself within. This failure however means not to perpetuate and create hierarchies, but rather to reveal that some vocabularies are not translatable; that some vocabularies are perhaps not meant to be decoded, but rather, trusted.

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