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Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

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11 Jun 2025

Remembering Audrey Capel Doray (1931-2025)

We are saddened to learn of Audrey Capel Doray’s passing on 11 April 2025 at Shuswap Lake Hospital, and we share our very best thoughts with her family and friends.

Audrey Capel Doray (1931-2025) was a major figure in the Vancouver art scene from the 1960s onwards, and her work in painting, drawing, printmaking, electronic art and sculpture has been acknowledged widely for its social criticism and investigation into pop art and feminist archetypes. She treated new media with the care and rigorous attention she brought to her process as a painter and master printmaker. Doray was an important proponent of the particularly Canadian optimism around communication technology that was associated with Marshall McLuhan’s writing and thought, engaging with experiments in new media, interactive and kinetic art and electronic communications that managed to set technology and nature in a harmonious relationship, mixing an investigation of new media with West coast ecological concerns. She and her late husband, Victor Doray (1930-2007), were community leaders in the 1960s Vancouver art scene, particularly through their involvement in Intermedia and its utopian spirit of experimentation and collaboration, embodying a particularly intellectual and cultural stance.

Audrey Capel Doray, Electronic Seascape, 1969
Audrey Capel Doray, Rocks, part of Electronic Seascapes, 1969
Audrey Capel Doray, Clouds, part of Electronic Seascapes, 1969
Audrey Capel Doray, Kelp, part of Electronic Seascapes, 1969
Audrey Capel Doray, Logs, part of Electronic Seascapes, 1969

The Belkin is fortunate to have many of Doray’s works in our permanent collection, including Electronic Seascape (1969), her last and most ambitious multimedia sculpture. This work incorporates moving light and ambient sound by Hildegard Westerkamp, with abstract, psychedelic images of the ocean shore using a computer built and programmed by Bob Mills, surely one of the earliest pieces of Canadian art to incorporate such technology. Critics received it rapturously in the 1960s as a work of uncommon beauty and lyricism; Joan Lowndes remarked that the work captures a “wondering rediscovery of the forms and rhythms of nature” (1969). In its sensibility to form, composition and lyrical line alongside its technological innovation, Electronic Seascape offers a holistic vision of nature and new technology in utopian harmony, an ideal for which Doray was so renowned.

Watch a 2008 interview with Audrey Capel Doray

 

Audrey Capel Doray received a BFA from McGill University and went on to study at Atelier 17 in Paris and at the Central School of Art in London. After moving to Vancouver in 1957, Doray taught at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University) from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, Doray joined Alvin Balkind and Abrahan Rogatnick’s New Design Gallery, an influential art space that presented live theatre, visual art, films, concerts, lectures and poetry readings. Doray has been the recipient of four Canada Council Awards. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections both internationally and nationally, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Tate Modern in London.

We will miss Audrey deeply and feel honoured to have spent time with her curious spirit.

Image (above): Audrey Capel Doray, Hieroglyphic Man II, I and III, all 1965. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of the artist, 2018. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

 

Related

  • News

    19 Jan 2021

    Works from the Collection: Audrey Capel Doray

    [more]
  • News

    28 Jan 2021

    Stations: Reading Room

    The following is a list of resources related to the artists in Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions. This list is not exhaustive or an official recommendation, but rather comprised of suggested readings compiled by Public Programs, graduate and undergraduate student researchers at the Belkin. These readings are intended to provide additional context for the exhibition and act as springboards for further research or questions stemming from the exhibition, artists and works involved. Resources are arranged by artist, listed alphabetically by last name. This compilation is an evolving and growing list, so check back in the future for more additions.

    [more]
  • Exhibition

    16 May 2008 – 10 August 2008

    Idyll: Three Exhibitions

    On the 40th anniversary of May 1968, the Belkin Art Gallery presents three exhibitions that address aspects of that revolutionary decade. Audrey Capel Doray was a pioneer in multimedia, interactive and digitally based art when she produced Wheel of Fortune in 1968 and Electronic Seascape in 1969. This exhibition will also include a selection of Doray’s paintings as well as a multimedia work called Pic-A-Mix by her late husband Victor Doray.

    [more]
  • Event

    Artist Talk: Audrey Capel Doray and Joan Balzar with Lorna Brown

    In conjunction with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s exhibitionIdyll, artists Audrey Capel Doray and Joan Balzar held a discussion about their work and their careers, which have spanned almost five decades. Capel Doray and Balzar reflected particularly on the 1960s and early 1970s and the context in which their work was produced. The conversation was moderated by Lorna Brown, an independent artist, curator and writer. Brown is currently working on a web-based project on Vancouver Art in the 1960s .

    [more]
  • Exhibition

    8 Jan – 11 Apr 2021

    Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions

    Due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are postponing the Image Bank exhibition until June 2021. Our January exhibition will draw on recent acquisitions to the permanent collection. Titled Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions, the exhibition will be in four or five interrelated modules that explore some of the gallery’s research areas.

    [more]

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

University of British Columbia

1825 Main Mall

Vancouver, British Columbia,

Canada V6T 1Z2 Map

xʷməθkʷəy̍əm | Musqueam Territory

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