Maura Doyle ‘Dear Universe/Cher Univers’ at AxeNeo7

Maura Doyle, Spring Barrel Firing (2022)

Maura Doyle’s Mid Career Survey Exhibition ‘Dear Universe’ opens at AxeNeo7.
June 22 — Aug. 6, 2022

Preview night June 22nd

Festive Night July 6, 2022. Summer Opening of Public Art Programming.

Dear Universe / Cher Univers

From the earliest days of her practice, Maura Doyle resisted the space of the gallery. Instead she developed conceptually-driven artworks that operated outside its context, such as documenting wild animals in their natural habitats near her family home in rural Ontario, undertaking elaborate correspondence — such as her decade-long mail order catalogue project with friend and collaborator Annie Dunning — and proposing hilarious actions like dropping 10,000 empty potato chip bags through the retractable roof of Toronto’s SkyDome. Doyle’s working process, rather than any final object form, is the real site of the work. While often involving a playful and dogged commitment to an endeavour, her work also relies upon “legitimate” instruments of solicitation and research, such as letter-writing campaigns and pseudo-scientific field studies. In so doing, Doyle invites her audience communities into an impish re-examination of context, labour, and value.

Doyle began experimenting with clay after becoming a parent because it was work she could hand-build in her kitchen while minding her small son. (It also enacted a subtle push-back against presumptions of how and at what scale a critically-engaged art practice is sustained.) Pots offered a vehicle for Doyle to explore selfhood: with their often complex and unknowable interiors, pots could be approached as containers of lived experience, and, as in Doyle’s writing practice, became portals for the artist’s spiritual exploration of the relationship between her inner and outer worlds. But as in her earlier activity-based work, Doyle’s pottery resists seamlessness and polish. Hand-formed and imperfect, the surfaces of her pots are left unglazed and blackened from the smoke of her open-flame firing process.

By drawing attention to the diminutive and the easily overlooked, inflating the personal to the celestial, and monumentalizing the low-brow, Doyle questions how we hierarchize and justify what is important to ourselves and others. She pokes at late capitalism’s patriarchal bombasticism and excess (everything must be supersized!), while simultaneously proposing in earnest a 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. Read more.

— Kimberly Phillips

Kimberly Phillips is Director of SFU Galleries at Simon Fraser University. Over the past 15 years, in her roles as gallery director, curator, and teacher based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh peoples, she has worked to amplify the voices of under-acknowledged artists and practitioners, ethically vision and build organizational capacity, and create meaningful and unexpected ways for contemporary artists and their publics to find one another. From 2017-2020 she held the position of Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), overseeing the gallery’s exhibitions, publications and artist residencies. Previous to this she served as Director-curator of Access Gallery (2013-2017), a Vancouver artist-run centre committed to emergent and experimental practices. Phillips holds a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia (2007), where she was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow. Her curatorial practice maintains a particular interest in questions of resistance, as well as the conditions under which artists work.