ALEX DORDOY – THE MOSS IS DREAMING
2017-09-25While Dordoy’s sculptures, paintings, and silicon ‘skins’ are preoccupied with their own materiality – their unique and bounded ‘thingliness’ – they are also deeply porous. Poised between representation and abstraction, the organic and the digital, his work appears to have been pollinated, or perhaps infected, by stray data. The broken Moebius strips of his sculptures employ wet jesmonite to absorb gestural passages of paint, the impress of corrugated card, and printed imagery including kimono patterns, alchemical symbols, and the artist’s own digital photographs of forest landscapes. Is this density of visual incident at odds with these sculptures’ modest – indeed domestic – scale, or is it only natural in an era in which that most commonplace of objects, the smartphone, seems to suck a whole universe of information out of thin air?
Hanging from the gallery walls, and existing at an ambiguous point between painting and sculpture, Dordoy’s ‘skins’ are made by using liquid silicon to cast the interiors of old photocopiers. Once dried, this fleshy material picks up not only the machinery’s inverted form, but also the streaks of ink and dirt that have built up in its hidden ridges and gullies – traces of its history of use. For all the ghostly charge of these works, they also reflect on photocopier technology’s enduring place in daily life, despite its long-predicted obsolescence. Notably, the artist has described the lumbering Xerox machines that linger in our offices, libraries and copy shops as ‘human’ presences. Perhaps what we value in the photocopier – and the paper document – is not convenience, but the way it affirms our own physicality in an age of weightless, endlessly reproducible code.
Opposite – The field lies prone, 2017
Exhibition runs from October 4th through to November 11th, 2018
Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP
