“Dear Universe”
works by Maura Doyle

January 19 to March 9, 2024

curated by Kimberly Phillips

SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
Audain Gallery
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC

open Wednesday to Saturday from Noon to 5pm

“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.

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