Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present Josh Dorman: THE LONG VIEW, an exhibition of Dorman’s recent works in antique paper, ink, and acrylic on panel that explore how remnants of the past continue to inhabit our present and inform our future. The exhibition opens on January 10th with an opening reception and continues through February 14th, 2026.
Dorman’s work is a riotous and ruthless romp through history as a means of investigating the present moment. Bits of paper ephemera – the knowledge of a previous era – fill the compositions. Paper of any sort is fair game – maps, books, technical manuals, player piano scrolls all find their way in Dorman’s work. These bits are de-contextualized and re-contextualized to tell a new story about where we are now. The works, in antique paper, ink and acrylic on panel, range in size from the intimate 9×12 inches to the monumental scale of over 6 feet in height by 5 feet in width. Layering, manipulating, and combining disparate images, Dorman builds and crafts and excavates and rebuilds until the compositions tell a story of a moment in time – of this moment in time.
With a nod to the likes of Hieronymous Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights, Dorman’s paintings are cautionary tales. And while deeply grounded in historic images and with the patina of old paper, the works are highly contemporary and speak to the current moment. What does an 1890s map fragment mean in a world of iPhones and GPS? These physical paper artifacts are folded into who we are now, yet we are forgetting our connection to them. Dorman is constantly foraging for peculiar old books—like a hunter, or a botanist. He finds disused knowledge in diagrams, charts, engravings, old textbooks. Part of his goal is to illuminate the value of old printed imagery, which depended for its existence on the filter of a human mind and hand, rather than on the camera lens. The works are a never-ending source of intrigue – with every viewing they reveal themselves. There are witty and unsettling histories, stories, a tableau here and there couched within the larger visual framework of the composition.
During a sabbatical from teaching last year, Dorman did artist residencies above the Arctic Circle and on the southern coast of Ireland. Dorman describes the experience of sailing a tall ship around the glaciers off the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard as being like being in a dream state. He imagined the feeling as something similar to how astronauts describe seeing the earth from afar, as a blue marble floating in darkness. The small ice chunks he melted to make watercolors were 5,000 years old. In Ireland, wandering through sheep meadows, Dorman stumbled upon BCE standing stones, covered with lichen. No demarcation, no “do not touch” signs. Just ancient history, living on in the present and close enough to put a hand on. Time compresses and expands at moments like that – we feel the eons stretching back and see that our moment is barely a blip in the bigger picture.
This sense of time is both comforting and overwhelming – the intensity is somehow simultaneously claustrophobic and freeing. We are in a time of disorder when politics are dividing people and the gap between rich and poor, the gap between right and left, the gap between understanding the human condition and the absolutely selfishness of the party in power are becoming almost insurmountable schisms. Where do we go from here? Dorman’s paintings offering solace – the divides are greater than they have ever been but if look to the past, we can use that knowledge to create a better future.
Josh Dorman (b. 1966, Baltimore, MD) earned his BFA from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and his MFA from Queens College in Flushing, New York. Dorman has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Minneapolis Academy of Art Museum, The Butler Institute of American Art and The Naples Museum. Dorman’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Art Forum, ArtNews, The Paris Review, and the New York Times among other publications. Dorman lives and works in New York City.
