Craig Dorety | Continuum

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - August 2022 Oakland, CA - Continuum is a new body of sculptural light pieces by Oakland-born artist Craig Dorety. Continuum runs in the side gallery concurrently with Origin Stories: Alexi Antoniadis + Susie Taylor. An artist reception is on First Friday, September 2, 5-8pm.

Craig Dorety explores our ever-shifting relationship to the properties of light, crafting time-based tracings of various imagery. Inspired by Johannes Itten's writing, Josef Albers' painting, and Isaac Newton's research, Dorety's sculptures are color-theory-in-action: exploring the ethereal properties of light, shadow, and time by providing them physicality and weight. The abstract works warp the viewer's perspective as hues morph atop shapes within shapes, using electronics and animated light to mirror the shape-shifting illusions natural light provides every day.

In a time when technology so often distracts and displaces, Craig Dorety's work uses pixels, LEDs, digital images and filters to stimulate focused reverie. In Continuum, Dorety's meditative sculptures use vibrant, animated gradients of light to extract movement from static images of sunsets, flowers and other natural phenomena. He expands on the particularities of these subjects by way of their sculptural shapes, bringing the viewer face-to-face with the limitations of perception. Through its creation of illusory depths, the work is often hypnotic, suspending the senses between voids in surfaces while employing minimal forms to achieve maximum effects.

"Everything changes over time. Even an oil painting slowly changes: colors fade, paint dries and develops cracks, the canvas embrittles or shrinks or warps. I like to experiment with time in a more immediate sense. I take static photographs - which are captured moments in time from a specific perspective - and stretch them into the fourth dimension. In essence, I use microcontrollers and code in a series of abstractions to turn space into time. Conceptually, this re-animates that captured moment-perspective, but in a highly abstracted way."

Continuum is on view at Johansson Projects from August 27 - October 15, 2022, with an artist reception on First Friday, September 2, 5-8pm. Johansson Projects is open Thu-Sat 1-5pm and by appointment.

For more information, please contact info@johanssonprojects.com / 510-444-9140

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Craig Dorety (b. 1973 in Oakland, CA) graduated from U.C. Davis in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis in Automation and Control Theory in 2006. Dorety builds custom electronics that express the complicated, bigger ideas he's developed from experiencing occasional ocular migraines and also synesthesia. Contemporary artist Jim Campbell has been influential to his practice, as Dorety worked as a design engineer in Campbell's studio, and the two have collaborated on a number of pieces together. He has exhibited at the Thoma Foundation's Art Vault (New Mexico), where his work resides in the foundation's Digital and Media Art permanent collection. His work has also been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Orlando Museum of Art (Florida), the Knoxville Museum of Art (Tennessee), the Hunter Museum of American Art (Tennessee), and Johansson Projects (Oakland). He was an artist-in-residence at the esteemed Instructables/Autodesk AIR program at Pier 9 (San Francisco) and an award recipient from The California Foundation of the Advancement of the Electronic Arts. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.

2300 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland, CA 94612

info@johanssonprojects.com

Johansson Projects is a contemporary art gallery that represents established and up-and-coming artists through exhibitions, online platforms, art fairs and programming. The gallery's curatorial emphasis gravitates toward artists who explore mysteries embedded in our current time, often using unorthodox materials and methods to symbolize universal experiences. Located in uptown Oakland, Johansson Projects is a locus for curators, collectors, and artists to connect and engage in dialogue with the larger art community both regionally and nationally.

This release was published on openPR.