I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists - Claiming the Time In Between-Making Every Day a Studio Day with Artist Hilary Doyle

Claiming the Time In Between-Making Every Day a Studio Day with Artist Hilary Doyle

02/19/21 • 44 min

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

The time in between is something we all deal with in life. The time between waking and coffee, the time between arriving in a doctor’s office and waiting to be seen, the time spent in transportation going from one point to the next. Hilary Doyle took that time and claimed it not only as studio time, but it became a jumping off point for her recent work.

Hilary Doyle is an artist, teacher, curator and gallery co-director. Doyle’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture about gender, class and psychology. She is newly represented by Taymour Grahne Gallery in london. Recent solo shows include “Metropolis” with Taymour Grahne online in august 2020, as well as “Echoing Voices” at One River School in November 2019. Her work has received press coverage in Hyperallergic, Bushwick Daily, and New American Paintings Blog.

Doyle is faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught for the last 8 years at various schools including Purchase College and a three year appointment with Brown University.

Doyle founded and co-directs NYC Crit Club with co-director Catherine Haggarty which was just included in observer magazines Arts Power 50: Change makers in the art world. She is also a gallery Co-Director and curator at Transmitter gallery in Brooklyn.

Doyle received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has an upcoming group show with Taymour Grahne Projects Contemporary Domesticity and Solo Show there in 2022. She also has an upcoming group show “The Symobolists: Les Fleurs du mal (the flowers of Evil)” at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea in February.

“Worcester, MA, where I grew up is one of many downtrodden, post-industrial cities across the US, filled with dilapidated factory buildings, joblessness, and overgrown yards. In cities everywhere people travel through similarly distressed spaces daily: the streets and subways full of zoned-out people caught up in the daily grind, staring with purple rings under their glassy eyes. This work examines contemporary working-class life. Focusing on the conditions in which people live helps us examine the rituals, psychology and emotions of daily life.

The work starts with mundane moments observed while commuting or while at home: a man staring at his phone while laying in bed or a woman balances on a yoga ball holding a baby. From these moments I make sketches, videos, iPhone drawings, or sculptural models to inform drawings and paintings. I experiment to discover relevant marks for each subject: a quick mark for the view out a window of a speeding bus, or a slick mark for tiles on the wall of a subway station.

Strangers, although unknown to us, are always leaving evidence about themselves as we catch a glimpse of them. People reveal their disposition in their folded arms, baby carts, laughing eyes, tightly clutched bags, or work uniforms. These clues spark imaginary narratives about peoples lives in each work. To examine fragments of people's lives, brings attention to the joys and struggles of ourselves and others.

Since the pandemic the work has become more imaginative and symbolic - using paintings within paintings to talk about the subjects within them. In our new surreal pandemic era fiction has become reality.”- HD

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Claiming “in between time” as your studio time

-Tips on Monotype Printmaking

-Printing at home

-Not wasting materials by planning ahead

-Using digital mediums

-Guerra

-Consider everyday a studio day

-Make art at any moment

-Working while breastfeeding

-Try not to go a single day without being creative, even if it’s just thinking

-Becoming more inventive

-Becoming more fearless after becoming a mother

-NYC Crit Club

-Transmitter Gallery

-”Stack your life”

-Having a routine

Artist Shout Outs:

Thank you to friends who do text critiques with me over the years

Catherine Haggarty, Claudia Bitran, Francisco Moreno and Meredith Iszlai.

LINKS:

HilaryDoyle.com

Represented by Taymour Grahne Projects in London

Recent solo shows include “Metropolis” with Taymour Grahne online in august 2020, as well as “Echoing Voices” at One River School in November 2019.

She has an upcoming group show with Taymour Grahne Projects Contemporary Domesticity and Solo Show there in 2022. She also has an upcoming group show “The Symobolists: Les Fleurs du mal (the flowers of Evil)” at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea in February.

Doyle is faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught for the last 8 years at various schools including Purchase College and a three year appointment with Brown University.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Claiming “in between time” as your studio time

-Tips on Monotype Printmaking

-Printing at home

-Not wasting materials by planning ahead

-Using digital mediums

-Guerra

-Consider everyday a studio day

-Make art at any moment

-Working while breastfeeding

-Try not to go a single day without being creative, even if it’s just thinking

-Becoming more inventive

-Becoming more fearless after becoming a mother

-NYC Crit Club

-Transmitter Gallery

-”Stack your life”

-Having a routine

Artist Shout Outs:

Thank you to friends who do text critiques with me over the years

Catherine Haggarty, Claudia Bitran, Francisco Moreno and Meredith Iszlai.

LINKS:

HilaryDoyle.com

Represented by Taymour Grahne Projects in London

Recent solo shows include “Metropolis” with Taymour Grahne online in august 2020, as well as “Echoing Voices” at One River School in November 2019.

Previous Episode

The Work Doesn’t Stop When You Leave: Artist Catherine Haggarty

It was such a pleasure to have Catherine Haggarty on the show! Catherine is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY who recently had a solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery. She is also co-director of NYC Crit Club, a space offering community, connection and critiques for artists. In this interview, Catherine talks about learning how to make work when no one is looking and how this has served her as an artist moving forward in her practice. We also discuss her current work that she recently exhibited at Massey Klein Gallery in the Lower East Side.

Catherine Haggarty’s paintings are reminiscent of the brief moment we experience waking up from a dream. When everything rises to the surface at once. The edges of objects blur and we wonder what we just saw. You can try to hold onto the experience, but you can’t completely keep the image in your mind, rather the image dissolves into something else. This is how I read Catherine’s paintings, as a back and forth between reading forms and reading space. The painting continually reconfigures itself as your eye is drawn to references of animal figures that you read as a positive shape. This figure then flips to become a negative space, bringing your eye deeper into the painting.

Haggarty’s paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Maake Magazine, Art Maaze Magazine, Art Spiel, Final Friday Podcast, Sound and Vision Podcast, The Black and White Project, Curating Contemporary’s book Eraser, and Young Space. Catherine has been a visiting artist & critic at SUNY Purchase MFA (2020), Hunter MFA (2020), Denison University (2020), Brooklyn College MFA (2019) and in 2018 Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University. Haggarty’s solo, An Echo’s Glyph at Massey Klein Gallery in the Lower East Side is on view Dec 18th 2020 - January 30th, 2021. Previous solo shows include This Friday Next Friday (NYC), Bloomsburg University (PA), One Main Window (NY), One River School of Art and Design, Proto Gallery (NJ), and Look and Listen in Marseille France.

Haggarty earned her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011. Currently, Haggarty is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) also co-directs NYC Crit Club with artist and critic, Hilary Doyle.

“In the summer of 2019 I visited ancient caves in France. I remember the temperature of the caves, the lines of raw earth pigment that formed figures & animals on the dark, damp walls. The connection to drawing and to pigment begins with our ancestors and threads through time to present day. I explore the differences between painting and drawing because the shared language offers insight on how we perceive and understand images.

By combining color, form, and patterns, I am able to expand the associations sparked by abstract animal signifiers. The level of representation in the work oscillates between recognizable figurative outlines to fields of color suggesting shape. To me, painting is both additive and subtractive and has no exact set of steps of production - rather a framework that allows in specific gestures, colors and marks in an irreversible order. This unplanned exchange requires my attention to where the patterns and marks lead me. I aim to remain open to movement and unforeseen connections in the work, a practice that reflects my studio habits and my way of operating in the world.

I avoid the notion of ‘knowing’ a form in visual language by conflating soft edge form that pushes against high saturations. Confounding spatial logic and touch in this way offers more questions than answers. The collection and also the subversion of various animals' coats, footprints and patterns in the paintings is far more interesting to me than the naming of the animal. I am not interested in the depiction of the one thing, rather I am interested in how my processes and materials can work with me to create new associations of the subject at hand.

The slippage of form in my paintings mirrors a slippage in language and meaning I notice in the world. Words are entirely abstract - they signify the subject at hand but often morph meaning with context, time, and language. Visually, I am interested in my process and subjects can mirror this dance. This fictional space I build is not based in a logical perspective or specific environment. Pattern is used as a tool to build an environment through repetition and motion - this defies the idea that animal forms might live in a specific space.”-CH

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Learning how to make work that nobody likes or will see

-Not knowing how you are going to get where you want to be, but taking the steps anyway

-Building the community you want to be a part of

-Supporting and being in contact with more artist...

Next Episode

Give Yourself Permission: Anissa Lewis on Social Practice, The Power of Words, & Being Right On Time

The work of Anissa Lewis dives into memory, yet is entrenched in her current community. Her photographs depict the present-day area in Covington, Kentucky, where Lewis grew up, and addresses the societal changes such as race, identity and relationships that have impacted the area over time. Images of the former residents are superimposed over images of the houses, to tell the stories of the people who made up the neighborhood decades ago. Lewis’s community-based signs address the here-and-now of citizenry, giving individual voices space to speak positively together. Lewis’s artistic work is intertwined with the community, and is constantly engaging with and responding to how the community shifts and changes over time.

In this episode, she describes her shift from a more traditional art background to finding and embracing social practice art. Anissa R. Lewis, community and teaching artist, was born and raised in Covington, KY by way of Philadelphia, PA—where she relocated after receiving her MFA from Yale School of Art. Lewis’ deep belief in community, identity and voice led her to many projects and collaborations including: an arts-based women empowerment classes for a Philadelphia County prison drug and alcohol abuse unit; a rites of passage program for black and brown teenage girls; student driven mural projects aimed to address civic engagement, neighborhood relationships and identity, and others.

Lewis’ work focuses on the power of place in her hometown neighborhood for which she has received a Creative Community Grant from the Center for Great Neighborhoods. Her photo-based prints, love letter yard signs and maps seek to reconcile her memories of childhood with the present-day neighborhood's changing social fabric, identity and the architecture of homes still present and those lost.

“While walking down a street in my hometown, many of my childhood friends’ homes are either boarded up or gone and now exist as open lots. The change of the neighborhood does not stop at physical structures, but includes race, age, socioeconomics, a community’s identity/culture, its aspirations and relationships. At the end of my walk down the street and memory lane, I realized that the neighborhood where I grew up no longer exists. New stories lay atop mine. This is nothing new in and of itself. I accept my insider/outsider perspective created by my relationship to a place that lives in a time past rather than what is physically present now.

In my photo-based prints, I seek to reconcile past and current my thoughts and experiences regarding these separate yet overlapping places about my childhood neighborhood. I do this by taking childhood photos and transposing them atop current houses in the neighborhood. As such, I am attempting to have a conversation about: What are the new stories alive and here now? Who is telling these new stories? In what ways do they differ from mine? What, if anything, remains from years ago that resonates with what now exists? Or, are stories and experiences parallel to the point where one longtime resident said, “I feel like a stranger in my own neighborhood." -AL

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Discovering things you thought weren’t for you but now are for you.

-Where you are born and where you find community

-Being Different-all valid and important to celebrate

FInding support and the importance in that

-When a one year sabbatical turns into a more substantial stay.

-Working for a non-profit about conflict resolution

-Discovering an interest in mixed-media

-The early 2000s was not as community based in terms of art practice

-Wanting to give back

-Navigating becoming a social practice artist

-”Do not need to split myself and do this art or that art.”