Visual Arts Visiting Speaker series presents

Michael Doerksen

Recorded OCTOBER 4, 2023

Michael Doerksen (b.1978) is a Canadian visual artist who has exhibited sporadically since the late 1990s. He holds a BFA and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

His practice is based mostly in sculpture with occasional detours in drawing, photography, and video. Currently, his large-scale soft-sculpture, Bots, is included in the 2023 Fraser Valley Biennial, a year-long touring group exhibition curated by Candace Couse around the theme of the body. This figurative group sculpture uses social media ‘chatbots’ as an emergent contemporary body depicted as a soft, plush, red velvet ragdoll presented in a dogpile of ten editions. His latest works-in-progress, complex wood carvings based on whimsies, depart from figuration to consider craft and vernacular objects as forms of meaning generated out of private reflection and toward social connection and cohesion. These two divergent projects are the focus of this talk.