What: UBC Okanagan Gallery acquires new artwork for Public Art Collection
Who: David James Doody
Where: Main floor of Commons building above the Sawchuk Family Theatre
Artist Talk: March 20, 2:30-4:00 PM, meeting at Rutland Bus Exchange
UBC Okanagan Gallery is proud to announce the acquisition of Maui Cowboys (2021) by well known Kelowna muralist, artists and FCCS lecturer David James Doody into UBC Okanagan’s Public Art Collection. Maui Cowboys is now on display on the main floor of the Commons above the Sawchuk Family Theatre. Measuring 6’ x 10’, this mixed-media painting reflects on the impacts of digital culture on the collective subconscious. David Doody’s work asks the question, How does visual culture predict or dictate how we see or feel about the world? How do the implications of digitization, mass surveillance, and data mining influence and transform the ways in which we communicate?
Maui Cowboys creates a frieze-like illusion by merging a latticed repetition of five figures with digital abstraction. The shifting perspective inverts elements of collage by focusing on negative space while the colours enhance the angular qualities of the layered forms. The largest acrylic canvas in The Dreaming Machine series (ongoing since 2015), Maui Cowboys was inspired by the artist’s time spent surfing in Hawaii and took three years to complete.
An instructor of sculpture and painting at UBC Okanagan, Doody’s work engages with ideas relating to urban planning, spatial temporalities, and architecture. His interdisciplinary practice uses elements of glitch production and mining, distortion, layering, collage, stain painting, and contemporary sculpture.
David Doody received his BFA from UBC Okanagan in 2008 and completed his MFA at Concordia in Montreal in 2017. Doody is the Artistic Director and Curator of the Uptown Mural Project, an educational urban art initiative that brings artists to Kelowna from across the country to collaborate on site-specific artworks. He has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, and prolifically across British Columbia.
An artist talk featuring David and Jorden Doody will be held on Monday, March 20th from 2:30-4:00 PM. The talk will begin onsite at the Rutland Bus Exchange where the artists will lead a short walking tour of their various mural projects.