Chris Doyle

Chris Doyle (b. 1959 – 2025) was 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 workoften 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.

In his previous exhibition at the 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 – on view in the South Gallery and Media Room January 6 – March 2, 2024 – builds on Doyle’s earlier work around landscape and memory. It evocatively depicts 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.

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.

In Summer 2024, Doyle presented an immersive, large-scale media exhibition at MASS MoCA, 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 worked and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mexico City, and Blue Hill, Maine, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2010.