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Josh Dorman is a collector of maps, manuals, textbooks that predate photography, and generally ‘paper that has lived a life and shows its age’. He is compelled to paint by systems he does not understand and information that has lost its relevance. Likewise, he paints to see things that would not otherwise exist.
His greatest artistic inspirations including Klee, Redon, Turner, and Breughel. Chinese ink landscapes do not feel distant or ancient to him but ever-present, and Dorman finds it absurd to focus only on the contemporary.
In the same way that dreams contain an alternative logic, Dorman mixes disparate elements on an intuitive level. The process of creating relationships between form and color guides him and he trusts in the idea of unconscious narratives. By amending existing documents text on maps is altered, locations blurred. Gravity sometimes “fails”.
He appreciates the inherent magic in collage. To create a place on the canvas where diverse images can live in harmony allows one to jump in meaning and scale a thousandfold within a few square inches. Scale is spiritual for him. Fractal forms echo infinitely, from the microscopic to the cosmic, he says.
Dorman is currently working with the Memory Bridge Foundation in Chicago on a project involving the “mapping” of the internal geographies and memories of Alzheimers and Dementia patients.
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