Time Travelers of Durham

TIME TRAVELERS OF DURHAM, And Other Fabulations, the first solo art exhibit of award-winning filmmaker Rodrigo Dorfman from October 7 to October 31, 2024, at the Frederic Jameson Gallery in the Friedl Building on Duke's East Campus in Durham, North Carolina.

Building on his decades of documentary practice and following the traditions of Renaissance camera obscura techniques, the complex legacies of Salvage Ethnography, the Critical Fabrications of artificial intelligence (AI), and the raw materiality of wheat-pasted street poster art, Rodrigo Dorfman creates DOCUPAINTINGS, a hybrid genre living and breathing somewhere between the immediacy of photography and the timelessness of oil painting.

From portraits of the Azteca dancers in Durham to the fabulations of the Nuevo South, TIME TRAVELERS OF DURHAM, And Other Fabulations features 40 large-scale DOCUPAINTINGS showcasing alternative mythologies emerging from the Great Latino Migration to the American South. Most of the works consist of oil paintings on photographic paper, wheat pasted on wooden panels ranging in size from 6'x4' to 2'x2, giving the pieces a raw materiality that echoes the construction materials used by most of the working-class protagonists featured in the series. Inspired by the liminal spaces in a chiaroscuro style, Dorfman, unlike past classical painters of the genre, invites us not to fear the darkness but rather be seduced by its creative powers. Negative space becomes a place of lightness where our imaginations can experience the longing when mystery and myth guide our lives.

Events take place at the Frederic Jameson Gallery on Duke East Campus, in Durham, NC.
● October 11 from 6pm to 8pm: Preview/Gallery Talk
● October 12 from 6pm to 9pm: Opening Reception in the Fredric Jameson Gallery
● October 31 from 6pm to 10pm: Closing Party, and trick or treating for all ages.

The series is curated by Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, paintings by Rodrigo Dorfman.