At Nicoletti Contemporary, London, Chris Dorland’s Clone Repo (server ruin) pairs a 1’20 video loop of corrupted social media screen grabs with two paintings — examining systems designed to preserve reality that ultimately fail.
An installation composed of a 1’20 video loop and two paintings. The video is made of repurposed screen grabs from TikTok and Instagram, accompanied by a score by Leon Louder, a Montreal-based composer. The sequence appears as salvaged corrupted data, abstracted to near erasure. What was once legible — a face, a location, a moment — has been reduced to pattern, noise, and residue.
The two paintings employ thick layers of polymer and inks resembling stills from a drone scanning wreckage: glitched, fractured, unreadable. Horizontal striations suggest surveillance and mapping technologies while exposing systematic flaws. Metallic pigments and distressed surfaces reflect tension between natural and synthetic materials, as though the ground itself is rejecting what was deposited onto it.
Together, Clone Repo (server ruin) examines how systems designed to reveal, preserve, or replicate reality ultimately fail — revealing the fragility of technological memory, the failures of mediation.
