Kent Dorn

Gallery Affiliations: Freight + Volume, Devin Borden Gallery

Region: West

In my paintings, which are inspired by nineteenth-century landscape painting, psychedelia, and ’70s horror films, I construct a wooded world whose inhabitants are stalked by an uncertain fate. The works are both foreboding and playfully macabre: faded watercolor landscapes are stained into raw canvas and littered with comical slabs and slathers of paint that illustrate a terrain wherein figures wander in search of a revelatory experience. The characters’ journeys, then, mirror the pleasure and uncertainty often experienced in the act of painting. The drifters, outsiders, and failed mystics that wander this space lost, intoxicated, or both, are above all survivalists haunted by echoes of the idyllic and sublime.