Clone Repo (server ruin)
Chris Dorland
25.04.25 - 25.05.25
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Clone Repo (server ruin) is the second solo exhibition by New York-based artist Chris Dorland at NıCOLETTı.
Featuring an installation composed of a 1”20 min video loop and two paintings, Clone Repo (server ruin) envisions a collapsed network of digital ruins–a landscape of decayed servers, lost transmissions, and corrupted archives.
The exhibition centres on a large LED screen playing a video made of repurposed screen grabs from Tik Tok and Instagram, accompanied by a score by Montreal-based composer Leon Louder. Abstracted to near erasure, the sequence could be a file salvaged from one of these broken servers, still playing but barely intact.
This sort of ruin of information is paired with paintings built up through thick layers of polymer and inks, reading like stills from a drone scanning the wreckage: glitched, fractured, unreadable.
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. Montreal) is a New York based artist working at the edge of painting and technology. In 2024, Dorland received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.
His upcoming projects include Signals Intelligence, group exhibition at eyes never sleep, New York (2025); and his first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, which will open at Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst (MgK), Otterndorf, DE (June 2026).
A monographic publication, Chris Dorland: Future Ruins, by Robert Hobbs, will be published by Hirmer Publishers in Spring 2026.
