East, London
Chris Dorland
Clone Repo (Server Ruin)
NicolettiNicoletti is pleased to present Clone Repo (Server Ruin), the gallery’s second exhibition with New York-based artist Chris Dorland. Featuring a new series of paintings and a video installation, Clone Repo (server ruin) envisions a collapsed network of digital ruins–a landscape of decayed servers, lost transmissions, and corrupted archives. Built up through thick layers of polymer and inks, Dorland’s paintings read like stills from a drone scanning the wreckage: glitched, fractured, unreadable. The accompanying video, which includes a score by Montreal-based composer Leon Louder, is made of repurposed screen grabs from Tik Tok and Instagram. Abstracted to near erasure, the sequence could be a file salvaged from one of these broken servers, still playing but barely intact. Cloning a repository means creating a local, full copy of a remote server, including all its files, folders and history. Throughout the exhibition, Dorland explores the failure of systems designed to reveal, preserve, or replicate reality, conjuring instead the fragility of technological memory, the failures of mediation, and the inevitable erosion of systems that promise permanence. In his paintings, while the horizontal striations of the compositions evoke the scanning processes of surveillance apparatuses, drone feeds and mapping technologies, their glitches and distortions expose their inherent flaws. Acting as imperfect clones, where layers of scraping and reworking mirror the overwriting of memory, Dorland’s paintings reimagine the archive as something fragile and fleeting rather than constant. Likewise, the scattered flow of glitching footage in his video underscores the fleeting nature of digital memory and the inevitable loss embedded in duplication. Themes of environmental collapse are also present: metallic pigments and distressed surfaces relay the tension between natural landscapes and the synthetic materials that document, replicate, and degrade them. The erosion of ecosystems parallels the breakdown of technological and industrial systems, exposing their inability to fully comprehend or control the worlds they construct. Exposing the fragility of systems designed to sustain and clarify the world, Clone Repo (server ruin) reveals how their failure to grasp the complexity of reality contributes to its disintegration. Chris Dorland (b. 1978, Canada) lives and works in New York, USA. Selected solo exhibitions include Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst (MgK), Otterndorf, DE (2026 – forthcoming); Lyles & King, New York (2025 – forthcoming); Clone Repo (server ruin), NiCOLETTi, London, UK (2025); Art Brussels with Super Dakota, BE (2024); Shellcode, Lyles & King, New York, US (2023); Protocol, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE (2021); New Day, Lyles & King, New York, US (2021); Active User & FLR-13, NıCOLETTı, London, UK (2020); Synthetic Skin, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE (2019); Sun Stalker, Aetopoulos, Athens, GR (2018); Civilian, Lyles & King, New York, US (2019); Density Build, Practise, Chicago, US (2017); Happiness Machines, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE (2016); and Entertainment Hardware, Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, Santiago, CL (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Signals Intelligence, Eyes Never Sleep, New York, USA (2025); Liste Art Fair Basel, art fair with Super Dakota, Basel, CH (2023); Synthetic Bodies, Lyles & King, New York, US (2023); The Tale Their Terror Tells, Lyles & King, New York, US (2022); Hell March, eyes never sleep, New York, US (2022); 06, PM/AM, London, UK (2020), Is Anybody Home, LOL, Super Dakota, BE (2020), NADA Miami, art fair with Super Dakota, Miami, US (2019); Frieze NY, art fair witth Lyles & King, US (2019); Front International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, US (2018); without Nature, Nicoletti, London, UK (2018); Dead Eden, Lyles & King, NY, US (2018); Hybrid Objects, L’inconnue, Montreal, CA (2016); Painted Perfect, Anonymous Gallery, Mexico DF, MX (2013); Lucie Fontaine at Estate, Marianne Boesky, New York, US (2012); After Hours: Bowery Gates Shutter Project, New Museum/Art Production Fund, New York, US (2011); The Exquisite Corpse Drawing Project, curated by David Salle, Gasser Grunert Gallery, New York, US (2010); Vor Gott ist Alle Kunst Scheisse, curated by David Ostrowski, Dusseldorf, DE (2010). Dorland’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Bronx Museum of Art, New York, USA; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York, USA; Microsoft Art Collection, USA; Dennos Museum Center, Traverse City, USA; Soho House Collection, UK; and Sigg Art Foundation, FR, among others.