Audrey Capel Doray

Life and career

Born Audrey Capel in Montreal, she studied art from the age of 15 in classes at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts under Arthur Lismer. She then continued in fine arts at McGill University under Lismer as well as John Lyman and Gordon Webber. After graduating from McGill in 1952, she taught art in Montreal schools and completed further work with Jacques de Tonnancour. In 1956 she spent a year in Europe, studying etching at Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley Hayter. His book New Ways Of Gravure introduced Doray to the art of printmaking. She also studied lithography at the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London.

In 1956, she married the artist and medical illustrator Victor Doray. On their return from Europe they settled in Vancouver where Audrey taught for two years at the Vancouver School of Art. She held her first solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1961. She also exhibited in 1964 at the New Design Gallery, the first gallery to show contemporary art in Vancouver, which adjoined an arts space that presented live theatre, films, concerts, lectures and poetry readings.

The earliest local artist to attempt to make Mcluanesqhue paintings was Audrey Capel Doray whose last series on canvas 1965, before she turned to sound, motion and light, was about the transformation of Typographic Man into Electronic Man. Capel Doray went on to produce some of the most emblematic work of the period involving light, sound and motion before returning to painting in the seventies.

Audrey and Victor Doray were instrumental in founding the Intermedia Society in 1967. Inspired in part by the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, it was a place for artists from multiple disciplines to meet and collaborate and was financed partly by grants from the Canada Council . Intermedia remained an influential force in the artistic life of Vancouver for the next decade. Among the initiatives it spawned were the Video Inn (a repository and exchange of video art) and the Western Front Society. The 2008 exhibition Idyll at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, featured Doray's multimedia works from this period, with the catalog describing her as "a pioneer of interactive and multimedia art that incorporated computers."

Following her solo shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery at the New Design Gallery, she showed at Simon Fraser University in 1966, the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver, and at the Jerrold Morris Gallery in Toronto. Her work was also exhibited in the 6th Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada in 1965. By the late 1960s Doray became known for her transparent plastic kinetic-audio-light sculptures exhibited both in Canada and the United States.These multi-sensory haptic-like works she related to art educator Viktor Lowenfield's teaching of perception by touch in his book, Creative and Mental Growth.

Art in America featured Audrey's Hexagon. This is a six-panelled polarized light kinetic audio installation that they considered inherent in the electronic medium. An interview with her in Vanguard in 1978, set against her solo exhibition that year at the Bau-Xi Gallery, discussed her work in murals, animated film, electronic art and the themes of motion and continual flux in her paintings.

The Doray's established a summer retreat on Savary Island, and Audrey became increasingly drawn to landscape painting and environmental issues. By the 1980s she and her husband were both active in campaigns to save the old growth forests of Canada's West Coast and participated in art projects for the Stein, Carmanah and Tsitika valleys. In 2014, she was one of the artists shown at the West Vancouver Museum in the exhibition The And of the Land: Perspectives on Landscape by Artists from British Columbia.

Doray's work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, and the Confederation Gallery in Prince Edward Island. Her serigraph Diamond is held in the Tate Gallery London and the National Gallery of Canada. Her work is also held in several private and corporate collections, including an electronic mural commissioned by Mazda Motors in 1973 and paintings commissioned by the Waterfront Centre Hotel in Vancouver in 1991. Continuing her lifelong interest in interactivity and movement her most recent work is a multi-media installation titled Here and Beyond exhibited at the Macaulay & Co. gallery in 2014 with a score by David Hykes.

Victor Doray

Audrey Capel Doray's husband, Victor Edward "Bud" Doray, was born in Montreal in 1930. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola College (now Concordia University) in 1953 and a Diploma in Art as Applied to Medicine from the University of Toronto in 1956. When they moved to Vancouver in 1957, Victor became the founder and first head of the Department of Biomedical Communications at the University of British Columbia. This position soon included developing the university's multi-media Instructional Resources Society (IRC) that was adopted as an essential teaching aid for all disciplines. His academic career proceeded in parallel with an artistic one working in film, mixed media, and watercolour. In 1973 he was awarded the Canada Council Senior Arts Award for the production of the multi-media program, Turn Off Delight. Along with Pic a Mix, it was a triple-screen presentation of an early automated compilation of slides and audio shown at The Western Front. Victor retired from his post at the University of British Columbia in 1985 to become a full-time artist and media producer. He died in 2007, survived by Audrey and their two sons, Jason and Gene. In 2008, Pic a Mix was shown again at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in an exhibition which included Audrey's Electronic Seascape. In addition to The Western Front and Belkin Art Gallery, his works have been exhibited at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.