Mark Dorf
Works, Bio/CV, ContactNewsletter
Contours
2019
While the planet has been shaped to reflect and sustain human presence—mapped, named, and imaged to scale—Contours meditates on what it means to attempt a shift in perception. The work dwells in this tension: the desire to decenter the self, to make space for the other-than-human, while recognizing that such a gesture can never be entirely disinterested or complete.
Through installed video and printed image, Contours renders a visual field of legible illegibility—where language stutters, imagery fragments, and meaning slips. This deliberate instability becomes a method of unknowing, a way of confronting the limits of recognition and control. What emerges is not a pure or objective perspective, but a refracted one—where abstraction, distortion, and illegibility become strategies for humility, for loosening the grip of anthropocentric sight.
Contours invites an ethics of disorientation: a willingness to be lost in translation, to linger in the gap between seeing and understanding. The work proposes that an inclusive future—ecologically, socially, perceptually—begins not with mastery, but with a conscious undoing of the frameworks that have long placed the human at the center.
Additional images available upon request.
Selected Exhibitions / Screenings
2024 Below Grand, New York, NY
2023 Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2021 GetxoPhoto Festival, Getxo, ES
2021 VDrome.org
2020 Houston Center For Photography, Houston, TX
2020 Somerset House, London, UK (Canceled due to Covid-19)
Selected Publications
2023 Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts Taiwan
2022 IMA Magazine - Issue No. 37
2021 Getxo Photo Festival Catalog
2020 Foam Magazine
2020 Keeper of the Hearth
2020 Fusebox Festival Catalog
Excerpts from Contours, 4k Video (Color, Sound), Dimensions Variable,12 min 03 sec, 2019