Daniel Dorall

b. 1979, Malaysia Arrived in Australia in 2003 Currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Daniel Dorall completed a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne in 2005 having previously earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with honours at the University of Malaya in 2002. He held his first one-person exhibition Maze at the George Paton Gallery in 2005 and was awarded the University of Melbourne Student Union arts grant. Since then he has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne including Lemmings at Mailbox 141, Corridor at Red Gallery and Slide at Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Space. Recent group exhibitions include Artefact at Melbourne City Museum, Size Matters at Albury Regional Art Gallery, Something Old Something New: The Sculpture Show at John Buckley Gallery, Behind the Scenes at the Museum at Yarra Sculpture Gallery and Small World at Blindside A.R.I. He is also currently undertaking the Master of Fine Art in sculpture at Monash University. In 2008 Dorall exhibited his solo works at The Kiosk at The Physics Room, Christchurch in May, Majorca Windows at Platform Artist Group in July and a successful solo exhibition at Dianne Tanzer Gallery - where he is now represented. He was also awarded the New Works Grant by the Australian Council for the Arts and a Research Publication grant by Monash University. In 2009 Dorall will again be having an exhibition of drawing and sculpture at Dianne Tanzer Gallery in November and his second international exhibition at Valentine Willie Fine Art in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in December for which he received a 2009 Bombay Sapphire Art Project grant.

Exhibitions

Line - 2009

Line continues Dorall's exploration of the maze in a two-dimensional setting. Applying his skills from his background in architecture, he has created a series of finished rendered drawings of the negative spaces in line mazes. The drawings are based on ten maze objects created in 2005. He will also present a set of mazes inspired by the PRB - Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as part of his research masters. Daniel Dorall is a candidate for the Master of Fine Art in Sculpture at Monash University. This exhibition is supported by the Monash University Research and Publication grant.

Daniel Dorall - Love Triangle: Ruskin, Effie, Millais

Gearbox Gallery - 2009

Shaft - 2008

A sense of place A trained architect turned artist, Dorall's labyrinthian models are based on line drawings of Melbourne city architectural plans. In the mazes he creates from these drawings, cardboard struts demarcate streets and building perimeters, forming boundary walls and partitions. Dorall's sub-division and miniaturisation of the city grid diminishes its monumentality and permanence. The sense of anxiety that pervades each work can be attributed to the fact that each zone represented - the aircraft, the bar, the street, the office and the church abbey - is a liminal space where isolation is felt and fraught interaction occurs. Dorall's mazes lead us to consider how we think about the city in bodily terms. The city has a heart and a soul. Streets, in addition to forming arterial routes, are also choked with traffic and/or people. Parks serve as the city's lungs. And the city has bowels and an underbelly. Manipulating this analogy, Dorall's work Life takes the form of a heart shaped maze and Death the form of a head or skull. These organs are severed and amputated from the human form, like archipelagos of compacted activity. By severing a system, such as the heart or the brain from the larger network and building a maze within it, Dorall seems to point to and question the sense of isolated belonging felt as players in the 'daily grind'. Here the irrationality of the human psyche is represented in contrast to the rationality of the city grid. The work Long Bar reflects another of Dorall's chief concerns; loaded zones of contrivance and artificiality. Spaces for engineered for socialising, whether voluntarily (such as the bar) or forced (such as the guarded waiting room in the work Shaft), are presented as contrived, anxious zones. A mirrored wall serves as wallpaper behind a bar, reflecting the drinkers in the work Long Bar. In this work, Dorall's figurines are engaged either in conversation (self and other) or a negotiation of the mirror (self and reflection) - each a confronting position. Mirrors and glass were utilised in Modernist architecture to change the ways in which we experience space. Mirrors are also a psychoanalytic trope to describe perception, being perceived, and self-deception. Appearing to draw from these traditions, Long Bar examines the individual at odds with the structure. The collective experience of faith is represented and questioned in the work The Good Shepherd, which is modelled on plans of Melbourne's St Patrick's cathedral. A flock of sheep is frozen mid-meander into the abbey, the implication being that faith is an organising principle of society. The questioning of faith is an anxious activity, since buildings such as cathedrals represent the vast human endeavour that is faith. We are humbled by the cathedral's scale, and the coded rituals that are performed within it psychically affect us. In this light, Dorall's meticulous reconstruction reduces the structure to a site of ceremony and contrivance. While for the uninitiated, these coded rituals are unfamiliar and further alienating, to the faithful these rituals enforce a sense of unity through faith. But for both these parties a questioning of faith is an anxious and isolated activity. Dorall replicates the anxiety associated with a questioning of faith with the lost, meandering sheep. But yet, a question of faith is opticalised and contained as we stand in as the Cathedral's oculus. As a viewer with this panoptic aerial view, we speculate that perhaps Dorall's impetus for constructing these mazes is with a longing for exhaustive knowledge. In works such as Shaft, figurines within the maze are in silent turmoil. There are crowds yet we feel loneliness, we are absorbed yet distracted, we feel turmoil in the stark order. Dorall's mazes map out the idea of 'inner workings' via scenes of navigation and negotiation, depicting how the city reflects and affects the body. Works such as Shame depict isolated figures searching out the one entry/exit point. They are psycho-geometric maps, the twists and turns depicting the subconscious. They perhaps neatly map-out the convergence of id and ego. The id could represent Dorall's depictions of death and conflict; and the ego, the organising elements, such as the walls and hedges which give structure to the maze. Each work is a substructure bereft of a super-structure and reflects the conflict between impulse (or desire) and the organising structure - the maze. However, beyond this Dorall's work makes us consider how the architecture that surrounds us becomes our own maze since a linear network of walls and streets chaperones movement. Dorall's work questions the complicity of our daily, negotiations of architecture, since the maze shows how architecture can also be slippery; it can fail to serve its function and can be deliberately deceptive. Walls are for support, for fortification, for defence and for adornment, however, Dorall's cardboard walls are a little more divisive, they confine negotiations and obscure possible outcomes and future steps in the journey. Dorall's walls are edges that codify the metaphorical implications of the edge; the edge can be anxiety-inducing or liberating. There isn't a sense of expanse in Dorall's cities; space is liminal and each 'room' exists as a point of pre-destination. The maze is a structure engineered by humans to entrap and disorient. The metaphorical sense of the linear in story telling for example, leads to a single conclusion, a finite point. The maze however, is a distortion of the linear, presenting multiple possibilities and multiple endings, allowing for repetition and reflection and presenting multiple paths as choices are made. Nevertheless, there is a sense of futility that hovers here, in the building of a structure to get lost in. Amita Kirpalani

Previous work - 2007

"My current art practice is informed by my fascination with the formal properties and possibilities of creating miniature maze-like constructions. This fascination stems from my background training in architecture. I have always thought that the best buildings were not only functional, but resonate on an emotional level through their spatial registers. Although the maze may refer to certain historical/cultural conception of a tour puzzle, my interest lies in employing the maze as the conceptual medium of my artwork. What this means is that the maze represents a constructed space stripped of its functional value. It is in this space that the figures in my work seek some form of resolution. The theme of my work therefore suggests self-exploration, memory, mythical/historical enactments, allowing various layers of human dramas, foibles and strength, comedy and pathos, to take place." Daniel Dorall

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