NEW YORK, NY.- Postmasters presents the first solo exhibition of Mark Dorf’s series Emergence. Shot in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado while working with ecologists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Dorf employs a combination of photography and digital media. The series updates the field of landscape photography into post-analog experience.
Through his altered images of forests and mountains, Dorf scrutinizes the influence of information on the sublime, examining how we represent the natural world through the filter of science, math and technology.
Humanity has an undying need to dissect and understand our surroundings: to define the unknown. We use the scientific method to mine for rules that act as umbrellas to explain the whole. Emergence explores the translation of our surroundings through this scientific method of data collection and its subsequent analysis and transformation. Science is an abstraction of our reality: collected data and theories are but translations and predictions of what we experience with our senses. Emergence repeatedly highlights the hyper-focal quality of science and the simultaneous representation of a single subject in multiple ways: photographs with pixels reordered by hue and saturation placed on top of the source image, landscapes split into planes representing measured division of space, and images taken from a single valley that were then rearranged to create the form of a fictional and abstracted mountain.
Mark Dorf graduated from The Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A. in Photography and Sculpture. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Dorf has exhibited internationally including at Division Gallery, Toronto, 2015; Gallery Kayafas, Boston, 2015; Outlet Gallery, Brooklyn, 2015; The Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru, 2014; Mobile World Centre, Barcelona, Spain, 2014; Harbor Gallery, New York, 2014; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 2013; and Phoenix Gallery, New York, 2012. Dorf’s work is included in the Savannah College of Art and Design permanent collection.
