Michael Dopp: 

Michael Dopp is an American artist born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1978. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the New York Studio Program in 2005. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from The University of California Los Angeles in 2009. Dopp currently lives and works in California, where he is a professor at Chapman University in Orange.  
 

Untitled (film still):

Untitled (film still) is just one of the many ‘film still’ paintings created by Michael Dopp, a series of nondescript paintings derived from still scenes of movies. Made with acrylic and joint compound, the work consists of a grid-like formation of repetitive dots. Within this grid, some dots begin to spread apart, isolated with a thin line of white between them, while other dots begin to pull together, connecting and overlapping. In some areas, transparency within the black creates areas of mid-tone grey, resulting in uneven planes of concentrated darkness that sprawl across the canvas. The resulting push and pull of positive and negative space within the work creates a scene of confusion for the eye, drawing it back and forth, in and out of focus as it travels along the painting’s surface. 

It is through this undulating focus that the viewer may begin to observe familiar shapes within the work’s abstraction. The title, (film still), also implies the presence of a scene that the viewer cannot immediately see, encouraging them to actively search for an object or form in order to make sense of what they are seeing. It is through this search that the mind of the viewer may be tricked into seeing something that is not there, or in contrast, the mind may trick the viewer into believing that what they are seeing is not the correct image. This particular work also brings into question the unconscious act of seeking out faces in objects and patterns, a result of the mind’s ability to understand visual cues for emotional expression. However, because of the fact that the title of the work only provides so much information, which is that the image hiding within the grid has been taken from a film, the viewer is left without any explanation or way of knowing what the scene could possibly be. Due to this uncertainty, the mind is forced to fill in the empty spaces, but is never able to make a definitive conclusion. It is possible that multiple scenes may flash into view, only to fall back into obscurity within a field of dots. 

Untitled (film still) invites the viewer to step back and attempt to observe the piece as a whole, while simultaneously encouraging the viewer to come closer and attempt to make sense of what they are seeing. In doing so, the viewer becomes trapped in a cycle of observance, never able to gain a definitive understanding of what they are looking at, in a fairly literal sense bringing into question how the ways in which we look at something influence our understanding or perception of that object or scene.