Doris Cacoilo is an artist and activist. She is the director of _gaia, an environment for creative process, an artist collective working to help support women artists and the advocacy of women's issues. She founded _gaia in 2002 with long time friend and fellow activist Amie Figueiredo in Hoboken, NJ. _gaia focuses on issues of the arts and advocacy and gives the women of the group a platform by which to explore activism and the creative process. With the organization, Doris has developed programs and events focused on the social, political and artistic lives of women. She recently curated the Inside group artist show, showcasing the work of 20 artists, helped produce the P.S.1 WACK! Open Studio Artists Tour and has organized the Wonder Women program, an annual group artist residency and exhibition.

She has an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and has been working at the Feminist Press to design and implement a website, underthemicroscope.com, as a social tool and resource for young women interested in studying and pursuing careers in science, math and technology. Her screen-based work, sculpture and performances have been exhibited in NY and NJ.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work emerges from an interest in systems: systems of creative practice and activism, systems of collaboration, and systems of power. In my screen-based work, performance, and sculpture, I explore issues of consumption, gender, labor and traditional power hierarchies. In many of my projects I involve interactive elements, objects, games and toys to allow the audience to arrive at the work from many different points of view, and at once open a dialogue which might be much more critical than the work might have led one to expect. Utilizing the power of humor and the everyday to attract viewer/participants who might otherwise disengage or turn away, I attempt to engage the public with work that can create a place for recognition and reflection of various types of systems.

I work to create new methods for the personal act of art and media making and to develop new creative spaces by researching the process of art making itself: both the process of creation, and the critical dialogue surrounding the work. This interest has led me to frequently work with collectives or in collaborations. From curation to public intervention work, my goal is to invent novel systems of order and authority and create a platform on which the participants can stand and engage in a new dialogue shaped less by preconceived notions of the Òcreative genius" and more on an acute attention to the process and environment of art-making as a social act. The societal norms that determine our cultural icons, the economic value assigned to the creative act, the process and value of education, and the reward system of the art world are inverted by the alternative models for these systems I create. Just as activism finds power in recruitment, I believe creative action can also find power in numbers. In customizing our own systems for discussion, critique and representation, artists can reinvent the establishment that may not readily include a space for them.