MAGGIE DOSCH
b. 1998

In a ceremony of simple moments, my work seeks to confront and implicate the viewer in encounter. These encounters feel familiar and social in spirit, seem academic and traditional in form, and yet stir a feeling of impending collapse, decline, or demise. The sentiment is borrowed from '90s Slacker era artists' scatters and spills, emphatically sculptural in medium, and translated in trompe l'oeil applications of paint (or pastel) spread frugally flat on well-primed canvases (or semi-smooth paper). Through narrative ambiguity, architected absence, and large-scale format, my paintings invite viewers to enter into a space for questioning the assumed and familiar. In recent works that range from scenes of a grandmother reading on a couch to tartly taking a bite of an apple; an oversized orchid stretching across a desert sea of invasive groundcover plants; a mummified sturgeon amidst disturbed sand—such stills pause narrative moments that are neither on the brink of beginning nor in the wake of conclusion. Is the waterfall of sand sourceless? Endless? When will the blue field completely consume Grandma’s faculty? How long until the fossilized fish starts to decompose? It is not entirely clear how the temporal sphere interacts with the painted moment, an ambiguity that leans into the sense of imminence.​

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In these ambiguous spaces, backgrounds are architected with absence (via empty color planes, incomplete or confused constructions, or expansive skies, reminiscent of Surrealist Kay Sage) to bring the subject (a face, jug of apple juice, capitalist's orchid, or ball bearing from Tame Impala's Currents album design) into focus. In such isolated moments of encounter, we sit with discomfort. We question how our families participated in colonialism upon arrival in Ohio (Midwestern Reckoning), we consider customs of elderly caretaking in the United States (Tough Old Bird), we examine how a culture of drunkenness affects our loved ones (Triptych Psychosis), we think critically about why orchids are such a commonly consumed household pet (Consumer’s Manifesto), we consider the way in which people, places, and things are so often displaced, neglected, and othered (Invasive series, in progress). Instead of swirling into a moment of action, we (the Colonizer, the majority) often stand frozen in an impending moment of bystanding deliberation while the invasiveness we help perpetuate pervades. Here marks the arrival at my most recent topic of inquiry: What is invasiveness? Who is invasive? How do I/we participate in systems of invasion? . . . And how do we manage? How do we reconcile and move forward? 

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As a painter and educator, I am inspired by democratic dialogue and the way in which individual viewers' separate funds of knowledge meld to create richer, collective meaning surrounding big, existential questions. Leaning into the art historical principles (and format) of mural painting, my practice interrupts quotidian experience with simple moments worth questioning. I am inspired by the way in which paintings can fuel and catalyze such discussion. My interest lies in creating expansive paintings that issue an educational space where there is room for a multiplicity of access points and the chance for people who have made up their minds to unmake and expand their epistemic realities.