ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present "I'm An Adult Now," a special exhibition by Toronto-based artist Kim Dorland. The exhibition will be on display in the West Gallery from September 27 to October 27, 2012. An opening reception will be held on Thursday September 27, 6 - 9 PM. Kim Dorland’s work has always been to some degree autobiographical. Though frequently veering off into more fantastical or extreme fictional subjects, he has always returned to the places and the people that he knows best. Now an internationally recognized veteran of the Toronto scene, his latest and seventh solo exhibition at Angell Gallery “I’m an Adult Now” (from the song by Canadian rock group The Pursuit of Happiness) fully showcases the extensive painter’s toolbox Dorland is well known for - and brings forth a new resonance, having added some strong new effects. The handling of oils remains powerfully fresh and aggressive in its materiality, but the artist shows a new maturity in which technical flash takes a backseat to a purer mode of painterly application and expressive finesse, the kind of ability that only comes with time. Dorland has produced possibly his most personal suite of paintings to date, depicting himself and his family in a warm landscape wilderness, still wispy with the vapors of dawn and dusk. We can perceive their mutual understanding by the minute choices the artist has made in describing their physical postures, communicating emotionality in a clear way, where the forest is a place of reassuring, pastoral healing. Dorland’s post neo-expressionist attack is always modified by some original x-factor; in this body of work it is his real and exceptionally close nuclear family that is the central preoccupation. Perhaps the most salient, if not certainly the most obvious characteristic of the work though is its quite overpowering redness. The color red suffuses all of the works, deployed in a lovely way that somehow retains the traditional power ascribed to that hue but without its negative and violent associations seeming to be present. For example in “Picnic Table” a lone bench sits in a forest clearing bathed in a wash of vermillion. Constructed from scraps of wood and protruding inches from the painting surface, the table showcases Dorland’s ongoing material daring, yet the scene is not aggressive thanks to its redness which creates a deep and inviting space for contemplation rather than fear. In “Him #3,” Dorland’s oldest son is rendered in red surrounded by a wash of yellow from the late-day sun. In keeping with Dorland’s signature portrait style, the figure is without features. Instead red paint fills in the subject’s psychology. This red is not about anger or violence, or about blood (except in the associative sense the word has to family), but about warmth, about the healing fire of getting older and having the people important to you around you. Dorland has never stopped painting his loved ones, but here he has done so with a touching eloquence, even by his standards. Kim Dorland was born in Wainwright, AB and currently lives and works in Toronto, ON. He attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and received his Masters from York University in Toronto. His previous shows have received reviews from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His work is included in public and private collections most notably: The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation in New York, The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, The Neumann Family Collection in New York, and The Oppenheimer Collection, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO.