Maura Doyle: Dear Universe. Installation documentation, Audain Gallery, 2024. Photos: Rachel Topham Photography.
Maura Doyle: Dear Universe
JAN 19 – MAR 9
Audain Gallery
Dear Universe traces a line through two decades of practice by the multi-dimensional artist Maura Doyle. Tethering together the exhibition’s works of sculpture, drawing, printed matter, video, and experimental writing, is Doyle’s attention to the inelegant, the easily overlooked, and the poetic possibilities lodged in day-to-day life.
In her early work, Doyle resisted the space of the gallery and frequently developed artworks that operated outside its context. She undertook elaborate correspondence-based projects, such as her miniature mail order catalogue series with friend and collaborator Annie Dunning. She chronicled peculiar tasks, like attempting to build the world’s largest gumball or ferrying a log gnawed by a beaver through the Panama Canal. While these processes often involved commitments to an absurd endeavour, they also borrowed “legitimate” instruments of circulation and presentation, such as letter-writing campaigns, documentation, and publishing. The DIY feel of these works’ physical forms, particularly as they upend presumptions of context, labour, and value, also proclaim a pleasure of material exploration for its own sake.
Doyle began experimenting with clay after becoming a parent because she could do so in her kitchen while minding her small son. Alongside its nod to pop art, her first series of ceramic sculptures—rough facsimiles of domestic objects—enacted a subtle resistance to presumptions of how and at what scale a critically-engaged art practice is sustained in early motherhood. Increasingly, both Doyle’s writing and her ceramic work have been focused on the relationship between one’s inner and outer worlds. The exterior forms of Doyle’s clay sculptures often contradict their interiors. But as in her earlier action-based works, these sculptures retain an element of the improvisational. Hand-formed and wood-fired in an open steel barrel, the surfaces of her pots are uniquely blackened and speckled from the soot and residue of potato chips and other salt-rich matter experimentally added to her kiln.
By bringing focus to the undervalued, inflating the personal to the celestial, and monumentalizing the irregular, Doyle questions how we justify what is important to ourselves and others. She scrutinizes late capitalism’s patriarchal bombast, but at the same time proposes an earnest meditation on the brevity of human existence within the immensity of cosmic time. In so doing, Doyle validates our asking of big questions alongside trivial ones, acknowledging that both are part of what makes us human.
Curated by Kimberly Phillips
Maura Doyle holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Central Art Garage (Ottawa, 2023), Pale Fire Projects (Vancouver, 2023), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2020), Open Studio (Toronto, 2019), Angus-Hughes Gallery (London UK, 2018), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa, 2016), Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax, 2015), YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto, 2014), ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche, (Toronto, 2011), Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2009), Remo (Osaka, 2006), Power Plant (Toronto, 2005), White Columns (New York, 2004), and Art Metropole (Toronto, 2003). Doyle’s work is held in the collections of the City of Toronto, City of Vancouver, City of Ottawa, Fidelity Investments, TD Bank Group, RBC, Ottawa Art Gallery, and Global Affairs Canada. She has been awarded numerous grants, including from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and is the recipient of the 2017 K.M. Hunter Award for Visual Art. She lives and works in Ottawa / Algonquin Anishinaabeg Aki.
The artist gives big thanks and gratitude to Kimberly Phillips, Mackenzy Albright, and the rest of SFU Galleries staff and installation team. She also recognizes the support of Claire Greenshaw, Rosemary Heather, Danny Hussey, Hannah Jickling, M.A. Marleau, Bridget Thompson, Paul Petro, and Jean-Michel Quiron. Special thanks to the amazing Jojo Cadieux.
Doyle also gratefully acknowledges support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and City of Ottawa, as well as the CT Scan Laboratory of the Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), Quebec City, whose technicians scanned her pottery.
This exhibition is an expansion of the project Cher Univers / Dear Universe organized at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, Quebec) by Maura Doyle, M.A. Marleau, and Jean-Michel Quiron, with curatorial writing by Kimberly Phillips.
EVENTS
Opening Reception
Thursday, January 18 / 7 – 9PM
Audain Gallery
The artist will be in attendance
Exhibition Walkthrough
Saturday, January 20, 2024 / 2PM
Audain Gallery
Join Maura Doyle and SFU Galleries Director Kimberly Phillips for an informal conversation and tour through Dear Universe
Mini Mail Art and More! with Collage Collage
Saturday, March 9, 2024 / 2–5PM
Audain Gallery
Support Material
