In Kim Dorland’s painterly practice, the bucolic Canadian forest becomes a site of tension, intertwining nostalgia and reverence with fear and uncertainty. Populated by ghostly hauntings and discarded beer cans, engulfed in man-made fires and dark miasmas, Dorland’s treetops are held under an atmosphere of delirious, hallucinatory unease. In Fever Dream, despite the towering flames, the scene feels vibrant and bracing, recognizable yet unfamiliar, with the tea-green sky and fire-blackened ground recalling the strange tricks of light cast by a forest fire. The burning trees themselves are painted not in the scorched char of dead wood, but in the lively clarity of an otherworldly blue. Beautifully rendered in heavy impasto, Dorland’s flawed environments are presented with a tactile vitality that gives their subject a vivid, energetic immediacy.