Hoarfrost #2, 2006

Bonelli ArteContemporanea, Mantova, Italy Private Collection, Montreal

“Into the Woods”, Contemporaneamente, Milan, 2006

“Into the Woods”, Milan, 2006, unpaginated, reproduced Sasha Bogojev, ‘Interview: Canadian Painter Kim Dorland on the ‘Same Old Future’’, “Juxtapoz”, 2 March 2018

Inherent to Kim Dorland’s work is a complex engagement with the history of Canadian landscape painting. Rather than present the land as pristine, pretty and unoccupied, Dorland often depicts a wilderness populated by ambiguous figures, partying teenagers and menacing phantoms. Dorland has stated, “For me, the woods represent nostalgia, identity and place. More recently I have found myself drawn to the woods because they seem so “now” in terms of our political/social/environmental realities. For me the woods also function as a stand-in for contemporary anxiety and dislocation.” In “Hoarfrost #2”, two faceless figures are framed by a sparse stand of birches. The artist has taken apparent delight in rendering the snow with generous impasto, tackling a well-established motif in Canadian painting. In this view, the trees are bare of the scrawled graffiti so often present in the artist’s work. The two figures appear locked in focused conversation, their rigid poses conveying tension. The icy blue of the sky cuts into the ground at the left and between the figures. The lack of an obvious horizon line fragments the visual composition, adding psychological tension and imbuing the work with a sense of the unreal. Dorland has commented, “The landscapes are imagined based on different landscapes I’ve got stored in my memory. I didn’t want it to be obvious where or when this is happening. Is it a dream/nightmare, a memory, are these ghosts of people who used to be here, a dark premonition of the future or maybe just all in my head?”