Audrey Capel Doray

Audrey Capel Doray

Audrey Capel Doray
Born 1931
Montreal, Quebec
Nationality Canadian
Education
Known for electronic sculpture, film, painting, drawing, installation art
Spouse(s) Victor Doray (1956-2007)

Audrey Capel Doray (born 1931) is a Canadian artist working in a variety of mediums—painting, printmaking, electronic art, murals, and films. In addition to her solo and group exhibitions, her work was exhibited at the 6th Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada in 1965. Prints from her serigraph Diamond are held in the Tate Gallery London and the National Gallery of Canada. Her work is described in North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century as combining "robust social criticism with her own interpretation of humanist theory" and dealing with pop art and the feminist archetype, themes of "perpetual motion and endless transition", and the interplay of sound and light.[1]

Life and career

Born Audrey Capel in Montreal, she studied art from the age of 15 in classes at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under Arthur Lismer. She then studied fine arts at McGill University under Lismer as well as John Lyman and Gordon Webber. After graduating from McGill in 1952, she taught in art in Montreal schools and studied further with Jacques de Tonnancour. In 1956, she married the artist and medical illustrator Victor Doray and spent two years in Europe, studying at Atelier 17 in Paris and the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London.[1][2][3]

On their return to Canada, she and her husband settled in Vancouver. Audrey taught for two years at the Vancouver School of Art, while Victor became the founding director of the Department of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia.[4] She held a solo show of her work at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1961 and the following year joined the New Design Gallery, an arts space in Vancouver that presented live theatre, visual art, films, concerts, lectures and poetry readings.[5] Both Audrey and Victor Doray were active in the Vancouver arts scene starting in the 1960s and were instrumental in founding the Intermedia Society in 1967. Intermedia, inspired in part by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, remained an influential force in the artistic life of Vancouver for the next decade. The society was a place for artists from multiple disciplines as well as engineers and technologists to meet and collaborate and was financed partly by grants from the Canada Council and the Canadian federal government.[6] The catalog for the 2008 exhibition Idyll at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, which featured her electronic sculptures and multimedia works from this period, described her as "a pioneer of interactive and multimedia art that incorporated computers."[7]

Following her first solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Doray had solo shows at the New Design Gallery in Vancouver in 1964 and 1965 and Simon Fraser University in 1966.[2] Her work was also exhibited in the 6th Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada in 1965.[8] By the late 1960s and influenced by the ideas of Viktor Lowenfeld, Doray became known for her transparent plastic kinetic-audio-light sculptures exhibited both in Canada and the United States. An interview with her in Vanguard in 1978, set against her solo exhibition at the Bau-Xi Gallery, explored her work in murals, animated films, electronic art and the themes of perpetual motion and continual flux in her paintings.[5][9] In the 1980s, following a trip to Savary Island, Doray became increasingly drawn to landscape painting as well as environmental causes. She and her husband (who died in 2007) were both active in campaigns to save the old growth forests of Canada's West Coast and participated in art projects for the Stein, Carmanah and Tsitika valleys.[3][10] In 2014, she was one of the artists shown at the West Vancouver Museum in the exhibition The And of the Land: Perspectives on Landscape by Artists from British Columbia.[11] Her most recent work is a kinetic audio sculpture titled "Here and Beyond" exhibited at the Macaulay & Co. gallery in 2014 with a score by David Hykes.[12]

Doray's work is in the permanent collections of the Confederation Gallery in Prince Edward Island and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver. Prints from her serigraph Diamond are held in the Tate Gallery London and the National Gallery of Canada.[2][13][14] Her work is also held in several private and corporate collections, including a series of paintings commissioned by the Mandarin Hotel in Vancouver in 1984 and a electronic mural commissioned by Mazda Motors in 1973.[1]

Timeline of artistic work

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Selected collections

Selected bibliography

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy G. (eds.) (2013). "Doray, Audrey Capel". North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, p. 160. Routledge
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 National Gallery of Canada (2008). "Doray, Audrey". Artists in Canada. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. "Audrey Capel Doray". Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  4. ↑ Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. "Victor Doray". Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (July 2008). "Audrey Capel Doray and Joan Balzar in conversation with Lorna Brown". University of British Columbia. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  6. ↑ Westell, Tracy (1980). "Introduction". Intermedia Society: An Inventory of Their Papers in the Library of the University of British Columbia, Special Collections Division pp. iii–vi.
  7. ↑ Laurence, Robin (16 July 2008). "Belkin Gallery presents a blast from our hippie past". The Georgia Straight. Retrieved 3 April 2015.
  8. ↑ Montbezon, Rea (19 June 1965). "Canadian Painting 1965 – A Shift in Focus". The Montreal Gazette, p. 24. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  9. ↑ Lerner, Loren R.; Williamson, Mary F. (1991). Art and Architecture in Canada: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature to 1981, Volume 1, p. 555. University of Toronto Press
  10. ↑ Burnaby Art Gallery. Core Burst. Retrieved 3 April 2015.
  11. ↑ West Vancouver Museum. (2014). The And of the Land: Perspectives on Landscape by Artists from British Columbia
  12. ↑ Macaulay & Co. Fine Art. Audrey Capel Doray. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
  13. ↑ Tate Gallery. Artworks: Diamond 1967–8 . Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  14. ↑ National Gallery of Canada. Collections: Diamond, 1967. Retrieved 2 April 2015.

External links