Second Street Gallery is pleased to present how strange it is to be anything at all, a solo exhibition by Josh Dorman, held in the Main Gallery from October 1 – November 19, 2021.

Read this recent article written in the CvilleWeekly publication on our current exhibitions HERE.

how strange it is to be anything at all showcased a series of non-linear, multi-layered large and small paintings, generated in response and homage to the album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Dorman’s paintings derive a poetic inspiration from the album’s language and internal logic to create a world that is hyper-specific yet completely open-ended and longing to provide a refuge within them.

“My studio overflows with musty 19th century textbooks, player piano scrolls, topographic maps, antique diagrams, yellowed rolls of wallpaper. These are my raw materials. I’m fascinated by how the past lives in the present. 

The paintings emerge as I place form next to form, seeking echoes of shape and meaning. After generating fields of detritus, I bury, excavate, and layer with color, collage, and resin, wandering through fog, flesh, glass, metal, water, flower, rock. I’m not satisfied until there’s so much visual information that I’ve forgotten a hundred events that occurred along the way. Like a fractal, the paintings expand infinitely inward and outward.

The title of this show and the wall of Pages were generated in response and homage to the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel -- to my mind, one of the great works of art of all time. Like the name of the band itself, the lyrics and sounds have a poetry that cannot be dissected. I seek this same internal logic in my paintings -- a world that’s hyper-specific, yet completely open-ended.

Pretty, bright and bubbly… Bristling and ugly... Some sort of time machine... When all is breaking... All under the garden... Soft silly music... Bursting with fruits... The earth looks better from a star... Count every beautiful thing we can see… It was good to be alive... Love all you have left. (NMH)

Equal parts examination of and escape from the world we live in, I do not set out my colors and paper scraps with a particular protest or prescription in mind. However, even pre-pandemic, my works reflected the dark rising waters in which we swim. These paintings are small rafts I throw to you, and to myself.”

-Josh Dorman

This exhibition is generously sponsored by The Pontillo-Galdencio Family and The FUNd at CACF.

Installation photography courtesy of Stacey Evans Photography

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Josh Dorman (b. 1966) is an artist who re-contextualizes antique images within fantastical drawn and painted works. Dorman sources collage elements for his mixed-media paintings from antique diagrams, engravings, maps, textbooks and documents that were published prior to the widespread use of photography. Dorman considers unfamiliar, obsolete and acrylic systems to inform his work, resulting in layered visual narratives that explore the mythical landscape and notions of collapsed time and dream states. In his latest body of work, that will be included in his exhibition at SSG, Dorman introduces an additional dimension to his paintings by cutting into the painting surface, generating pockets and pools of space. Into these, he layers collage and paint with multiple pours of liquid resin, building reliquary-like time capsules and trapping imagery like insects in amber.

Dorman has exhibited at Georgia State University (2020), Longview Museum of Fine Arts (2019), Bates College Museum of Art (2014), Tang Museum (2011), Katonah Museum (2010), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (2010), Craft and Folk Art Museum (2008), Trierenberg Corporate Kunsthalle (2006), California State University at Long Beach (2005), CUE Art Foundation (2004), The Drawing Center (2004), and the National Academy Museum (2004).

Dorman’s work is included in permanent collections at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, MA; Butler Institute of American Art, OH; International Collage Center, PA; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NY; Memory Bridge Foundation, IL; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Naples Museum, FL; Springfield Art Museum, MO; and the Wellington Management Company, MA. Dorman is currently represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City, John Martin Gallery in London, and Koplin Del Rio in Seattle. The artist lives and works in New York City.