Chris Doyle is a multidisciplinary artist who received his BFA from Boston College and his Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Doyle’s work often meditates on regenerative life cycles and the tension between destruction and repair. In 2017, Doyle concluded a multi-year project responding to Hudson River painter Thomas Cole’s five-painting series, The Course of Empire (1833 - 1836). The project imagined a landscape transforming from an agrarian space into a densely built environment, turning to ruin through overpopulation and pollution. The first video in the project, Apocalypse Management, was commissioned by MASSMoCA for the exhibit These Days: Elegies for Modern Times and exhibited in 2009.
Doyle’s temporary and permanent urban projects include commissions for the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as for the cities of Melbourne, Australia, and Edmonton, Canada; within the U.S., he has received commissions from Culver City, California; Kansas City, Missouri; Tampa, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Austin, Texas; Times Square in New York City.
In July 2014, Doyle’s film Bright Canyon transformed Times Square’s electronic billboards into a flourishing canyon of waterfalls and creatures. In 2015, Doyle was also commissioned to produce The Lightening: A Project for Wave Hill's Aquatic Garden in celebration of Wave Hill's 50th anniversary.
For his solo presentation at Catharine Clark Gallery, The Parables of Correction (2020), Doyle created intricately rendered animations and watercolors depicting a futuristic factory with strange machines and alien-like assembly line workers. Conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, it emerged from a global moment that redefined shared concepts of progress, slowness, isolation, and connection. You Should Lie Down Now and Remember the Forest (2024) built on Doyle’s earlier work around landscape and memory. It evocatively depicted a forest transitioning through seasons and cycles of growth across three series of work. The exhibition prompts reflection on collective and personal losses during Covid-19, as well as the potential for new life and beginnings arising from loss.
In 2024, Doyle presents an immersive, large-scale media exhibition at MASS MoCA, titled Chris Doyle: The Coast of Industry, curated by Denise Markonish. In 2022, he was the subject of a solo museum exhibition, The Fabricators, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. Doyle’s work has been exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum of Art, MASSMoCA, P.S.1 Museum of Art, the Tang Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Taubman Museum of Art, and The Sculpture Center. Doyle has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, NYSCA, Creative Capital Foundation and the MAP Fund. He received the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection Prize and was named as a Guggenheim Fellow in the discipline of Film and Video. Doyle lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2010.
