Opening Reception: Thursday, Jan 14, 5-8pm

Blanket is pleased to present How I Became A Solitary Noisemaker, a solo exhibition of works by a Canadian artist Audrey Capel Doray. The exhibition consists of a selection of paintings produced during 1965-1966 and is the first of three intended exhibitions at the gallery with a central focus on Capel Doray’s cultural production during the 1960s.

In the early 1960s Capel Doray embarked on a new reality within the Vancouver art scene, which was fueled by the interest in the transformation of consciousness through the use of psychedelic drugs and utopian inquiry in communication theories, digital technology and its possibilities. It was in 1963 when Marshall McLuhan visited the University of British Columbia and became the focus of a group of individuals (Intermedia was one such group later in the decade) that formulated the local art scene, transforming the city into a focus of vital growth of Contemporary Canadian art. As a pioneer in the new media art, Capel Doray (along with local Gary Lee-Nova and Claude Breeze) was also actively engaged in experimenting with McLuhanesque ideas of collage, concrete poetry and communicability. With a distinct west coast accent (Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell immediately come to mind), Capel Doray's two-dimensional work takes on and transforms the elements of pop and op art, hard edge and minimalism, geo abstraction and emblematic depiction, numerical and textual optical games - all the contemporary anti-theses evident in the global art production of the moment. Experimenting with design, graphic forms and shapes as units of information, Capel Doray exercises a culturally referent position where realistic and surrealistic moments collide with highbrow painting and folk art, reflecting on one of the most politically charged decades in the last century.

Markus Amm, Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Lorna Macintyre,Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Mark Soo, and James Welling