Artist Chris Doyle’s work highlights the precarious moments we face in attempting to care for the natural world, resulting in narratives built around themes of interconnectivity and the tension between the individual and the group in a culture fiercely devoted to progress. His video animation The Coast of Industry runs nearly 300 feet along one wall of Building 5, like a vast panoramic scroll. The Coast of Industry is inhabited by a family of machines that have learned to work together in concert with the natural world in loops of perpetual labor. Like organs of a body, the machines are interconnected, and each has a discrete function that contributes to the life of the larger organism. For the machines, repetition has a calming effect, and though it doesn’t expand the system thrives. Featuring a soundtrack by Jeremy Turner.

About the Artist: Chris Doyle has exhibited widely at venues in the U.S. and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, the San José Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Tang Teaching Museum, the Wellin Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and as part of the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and the Melbourne International Arts Festival. His temporary and permanent urban projects include commissions for the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as for 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; and, most recently, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Wave Hill in The Bronx, New York. He is the recipient of a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the 2014 Borusan Contemporary Art Collection Prize. His work has also been supported by grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, NYSCA, and the MAP Fund. Doyle previously exhibited in the MASS MoCA exhibition These Days: Elegies for Modern Times, 2009.

Production Credits:

Jeremy Turner, composer
Owen O’Neill, sound design
Animation assistance, Penn Eastburn
Mike Werner, percussion
Alex Sopp, flute
Anton Rist, clarinet
William Short, bassoon
The Jack Quartet
Jeremy Turner, electronics
Special thanks to the Music Academy of the West, Montecito, California

The Coast of Industry is made possible by Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham and The O’Grady Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by Parsons Audio LLC and Genelec INC. Programming at MASS MoCA is made possible in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and Mass Cultural Council.

Still from Chris Doyle, The Coast of Industry, 2024