Interview with Chris Dorland

In this interview, curator Marlene Corbun speaks with Chris Dorland about systems, interfaces, and the physical aftereffects of digital culture. On February 10, Marlene will host an online guided studio tour to our collectors, offering a closer look at Dorland’s process and current work.

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Marlene Corbun: Your work often engages with large-scale digital systems without depicting them directly. How do you translate the presence of these forces into visual form without making them literal or explanatory?

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Chris Dorland: I’m less interested in showing systems than in working with their aftereffects. These structures—whether technical, economic, or informational—are so pervasive that they rarely appear as discrete objects. Instead, they register as pressure, distortion, or residue. My approach is to let those forces shape the image indirectly: through fragmentation, scale, erosion, or compression. The work isn’t interested in explaining how systems operate so much as in registering their pressure—how they compress perception, reorganize attention, and leave traces on the image and the body.

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Digital culture is frequently imagined as immaterial, yet your practice insists on physicality—through scale, surface, and the bodily intensity of the image. How do you think about the relationship between the digital and the physical in your work?

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I’ve never experienced the digital as immaterial. Screens affect posture, attention, breathing; images carry weight even when they’re dematerialized. My work tries to reintroduce that physical dimension—to slow things down, give them mass, texture, resistance. Painting, in particular, allows digital source material to become something you encounter with your body, not just your eyes. That translation—from frictionless flow to material presence—is central to the work.

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Interfaces recur throughout your practice—not as neutral tools, but as charged visual and psychological spaces. What draws you to the interface as both an image and a structure?

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Interfaces are where power becomes aesthetic. They’re designed to feel smooth, intuitive, frictionless, yet they organize behavior, perception, and access in very specific ways. I’m drawn to that tension—the way something can appear neutral while quietly shaping experience. In the work, interfaces become unstable or estranged: no longer fully legible, no longer trustworthy. They’re treated less as functional objects and more as psychological architectures.

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Many of your images hover between clarity and breakdown. What role do opacity, distortion, or partial legibility play in how you want viewers to experience the work?

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Opacity is important to me. We’re surrounded by images optimized for instant comprehension, constant availability, and seamless consumption. I’m interested in slowing that down—introducing moments where meaning doesn’t immediately resolve. Distortion and partial legibility aren’t meant to obscure so much as to create space for reflection. They ask the viewer to linger, to sit with uncertainty, to notice how quickly we expect images to make sense.

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You are currently developing a new body of work that will be presented in New York. Can you share what you’re exploring in this project, and how it extends or complicates your previous work?

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The new work continues my interest in interfaces and systems, but with a stronger emphasis on extraction—how images, attention, and data are pulled from both bodies and environments. The work is darker, more compressed, and less stable than earlier paintings. Visually, it leans into metallic surfaces, signal noise, and layered structures that feel simultaneously architectural and eroded. Conceptually, it’s about what remains after systems extract what they need—and what it means to work with that residue.

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As digital art becomes more deeply embedded within institutions and markets, how do you think about maintaining critical integrity over the long arc of a practice?

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Art has always existed in a double position—both inside systems of power and, at times, in tension with them. I don’t think this is unique to digital art. For me, integrity isn’t about standing outside these structures, which is largely a fiction, but about attention over time: how decisions accumulate, what compromises are made or refused, and how consistently a practice returns to its core questions. In the end, the work—and the life around it—has to cohere.

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Chris Dorland is a New York–based artist working across painting, installation, and digital media. His work examines how images are shaped by the technical conditions of software, hardware, and networked systems—how compression, distortion, saturation, and data loss operate as structuring forces rather than stylistic effects.

Drawing from digitally mediated source material, Dorland treats images as system outputs, translating digital constraints into material conditions through surface accumulation, noise, and signal breakdown. The work occupies a hybrid space between digital circulation and physical presence, suspending legibility while registering the pressures of continuous mediation and extraction.

Dorland’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe will be presented at the Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Germany, and a monographic publication, Chris Dorland: Future Ruins, by Robert Hobbs, will be published by Hirmer Publishers.

He has exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including the Queens Museum; the Neuberger Museum of Art; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art; the New Museum; Super Dakota; Nicoletti; Lyles & King; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Neuberger Museum of Art. In 2024, Dorland received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

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Check here for more: https://chris-dorland.com/

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Watch the Virtual Studio Visit with Chris Dorland organized by 100 collectors:

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