Josh Dorman's collaged paintings on display at the Craft and Folk Art Museum
His works are built of topographical maps and other elements.
Josh Dorman's show at the Craft and Folk Art Museum opens with a warning, but not the usual sober sign you see at the entrance to certain exhibitions, aiming to shelter the unprepared from "inappropriate" content.
The notice, painted in sprightly letters on a plum-colored wall, alerts visitors that viewing Dorman's collaged paintings may cause them to experience instability or dislocation. They might lose track of scale, gravity, time. "While clear answers may or may not reveal themselves," the wall text declares, "the loose logic of a dream state will surely reveal much truth."
Most of the work in "Within Four Miles: The World of Josh Dorman" is based on old topographical maps that the artist has cut out and collaged onto panels or canvas, drawn into and painted over. Typically, maps offer certitude and a clear sense of positional relationships. Dorman's versions shed the anchors of rational order. They trade scientific method for poetic instinct. In finding a new use for old materials, Dorman has also resuscitated an obsolete definition of the word "map": "to bewilder."
For Dorman, losing oneself and finding oneself aren't such contrary propositions. "Most of the time I have no idea where a piece is going to go or what it's going to end up as," he said in a conversation during the opening weekend of his first museum show. As deliberate in his speech as he is spontaneous on the page, he added: "I don't trust the idea of forcing something. I want to find ideas organically. I find an entry point, like an edge of a landscape element, and just add things and sometimes subtract things. It's like an adventure, discovering stuff in the process."
Dorman's works are all journey, no destination -- or perhaps multiple destinations. He toys with place names on maps, adding or blocking out letters to spell puns or playful descriptions. From old books, he cuts out diagrams of machine parts, botanical specimens and microorganisms, charts of celestial schema and ancient languages, weaving them together into a fluid, fictive realm. Forms give way to other forms with free-associative ease. Planes tilt and warp; scale and perspective shift radically. Epic themes infiltrate raw sensation. The antiquated and schematic merge with the new and immediate.
