Selling Exhibition: Paintings from 2007-2013
Kim Dorland, known for his fluorescent, super-thick paintings, is one of Canada’s most important contemporary artists. The paintings in Former Selves, made between 2007 and 2013, exemplify a time before the tagline “Tom Thomson on acid” attached itself to his reputation with an abundance of journalistic glue. Thomson was a huge influence on Dorland, and in a career-defining exhibition at McMichael Canadian Art Collection[i], his paintings hung alongside works by Thomson, David Milne, and Emily Carr.
But while Thomson painted literal visions, Dorland’s visions feel literary. His zombies, ghosts, and loners in hoodies are a cast of characters. His settings, floodlit or as dark as the grave, are dramatic. In a Dorland, the glowing birches are our sadness, the sasquatch our loneliness – for who believes in us? The best Dorlands sizzle with the kind of existential agony all honest people feel. But once the acid stops burning, beautiful bits of language float to mind – “Dawn and doom were in the branches” wrote Zora Neale Hurston[ii]. And the sheer volume of paint on so many Dorland canvasses is a perfect realization of a term applied to the poems of Emily Dickenson: Sumptuous Destitution[iii].
On the other hand, they are also just kind of heavy metal – rife with skulls, flames, and an intensely molten gloom. My neighbour is a metal dude. Jean Jacket. Big high-tops. Iron Maiden flag in the window. I have a hunch that when he looks at the world, he sees it just like Dorland does.
This catalogue will describe eleven paintings, specifically their paradoxical effects on the psyche. All the best art holds opposites in tension, as does the painting life itself. “I still feel the intent I had when I was working on them,” says Dorland, who feels a fondness for these works, and a bit of nostalgia. “I feel like the same guy who painted them, but I also feel like a completely different person.”
Sarah Swan
Sarah Swan is an arts writer based in Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.
[i] The exhibition You Are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting, was held at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection from October 2013 to early 2014.
[ii] Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, 1937.
[iii] The term was first used by poet and critic Richard Wilburin in his 1963 essay on Dickenson.
