Doris Totten Chase
Encyclopedia
Doris Totten Chase was a painter, teacher, and sculptor, but is best remembered for pioneering in the production of key works in the history of video art. She was a member of the Northwest School (art)
Northwest School (art)
The Northwest School was an art movement based in small-town Skagit County, Washington, and was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.-The big four:...

.

Sensual Light

Chase's work won honors and awards at 21 film and video festivals. Her work has a permanent place in the archives of New York's Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 (MoMA). It is collected by major museums and art centers in several countries.

Working with light as her medium, with dancers turned into flowing colored shapes, Chase brought the Northwest sensibility
Northwest School (art)
The Northwest School was an art movement based in small-town Skagit County, Washington, and was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.-The big four:...

 to video. Her particular favorite was a pale blue, similar to the color of the sky in a summer sunset. Highly sensual, her work is fluid and stable while exploring movement in the context of abstract architecture.

Overcoming Bias

Chase had a substantial career as a painter and sculptor before she set off for New York, where she made groundbreaking videos. Pursuing her art was easier in New York than in the Northwest, where she endured considerable condescension for being female. In the early days of her career, gender bias was alive and well among the Northwest art establishment, which tended to treat her like a housewife with pretensions. Her subsequent art, which often championed the cause of women, is some indication of the pain such prejudice caused.

Early years

Chase was born Doris Mae Totten, the only daughter of a Seattle attorney. She attended Ravenna Grade School, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1941. She studied architecture at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 and pledged Chi Omega http://groups.northwestern.edu/chiomega/Chi%20Omega,%20Xi%20Chapter/Famous%20ChiOs.html before dropping out of college in 1943 to marry Elmo Chase, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy.

She had become seriously ill after Gary's birth, suffering what was then termed a "nervous breakdown." The cause of the emotional collapse was clear to her: "I was doing everything except what I wanted to do, which was to paint." Encouraged by a counselor, she began to take time to paint. She studied oil painting briefly with the Russian artist Jacob Elshin, and with the Greek artist Nickolas Damascus. She took a class with Northwest artist Mark Tobey
Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the...

.http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?artist=108959 She was very encouraged when, in 1948, one of her paintings was accepted into the Northwest Annual Exhibition.

When son Gary was 3 years old, and Doris was pregnant again, Elmo contracted polio and became almost totally paralyzed. At the same time, they were building a house (Doris Chase was the architect) that was two-thirds finished. To support the family, Chase taught painting and design at Edison Technical School; art collector Virginia Wright was one of her students. Chase was accepted into Women Painters of Washington
Women Painters of Washington
The Women Painters of Washington is a non-profit organization based in the U.S. state of Washington. The group was formed on October 6, 1930 by six female artists who met while attending a portrait class sponsored by the Art Institute of Seattle, which was a predecessor to the Seattle Art Museum...

 in 1951. Chase remained a member until the mid-1960s.http://www.womenpainters.com/ABOUT/About.htm

Northwest art

Chase's early paintings were Northwest landscapes and figures, often musicians, in blocks of color. She favored heavy oil surfaces, sometimes building them up with sand to achieve coarse texture. She credits inspiration for her style to the structured designs of Northwest Coast Native American basketry and carving.
Northwest painter Kenneth Callahan
Kenneth Callahan
Kenneth Callahan was a noted 20th century Abstract Expressionism painter, art critic curator, and a founder of the Northwest School....

, in an article for The Seattle Times, reviewed Chase's first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Otto Seligman Gallery, and called Chase "a serious and talented young painter."

In 1961, Chase was invited to show at Galleria Numero in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. Subsequent shows were in New York and in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, where a writer for Tokyo Shimbun compared her work to Japanese sumi painting.

Chase was accepted into the Huntington Hartford Foundation's artists' colony in Pacific Palisades, California, in 1965, 1966, and 1969, each time for a month.

From early wash drawings, her work evolved into a series of cement paintings meant for outdoor use, inscribed with faces, and words like "joy" and "love." Chase experimented with painting on shaped canvases when one of her students gave her some pieces of laminated oak. Her first solo New York exhibition, in 1965, at the Smolin Gallery, contained paintings on wood. She exhibited a series of small painted sculptures inset with hinged sections which opened to reveal additional painted section.

Soon the painted pieces and laminated wood shapes became large. She sculpted pieces that weren't fixed in a position, but rather invited viewers to participate in rearranging modules. Many of the forms, such as a black-stained fir piece titled Haida, resembled the look of Northwest Coast Native American art
Northwest School (art)
The Northwest School was an art movement based in small-town Skagit County, Washington, and was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.-The big four:...

. Chase felt the inspiration came from pieces she'd seen at the Alaska
Alaska
Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...

-Yukon
Yukon
Yukon is the westernmost and smallest of Canada's three federal territories. It was named after the Yukon River. The word Yukon means "Great River" in Gwich’in....

-Pacific Exposition (of 1909) that were on the University of Washington campus when she attended classes there.
Meanwhile, some of the hoops and circles, arches and ellipses Chase created had grown large enough to be walked through, allowing people to interact with them. While sculpture was still considered a man's work in the 1960s, Chase showed that women could create in this medium as well.
An early steel sculpture, the 4.6 m (15.1 ft) tall Changing Formhttp://www12.flickr.com/photos/nwphotoguy/177452217/in/set-72157594181060491/, was commissioned for Kerry Park
Kerry Park (Seattle)
Kerry Park is a park on the south slope of Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, Washington, located at the corner of 2nd Avenue W. and W. Highland Drive. According to a plaque on a wall in the park, "Kerry Park [was] given to the City in 1927 by Mr. and Mrs...

 on Queen Anne Hill, at the waterfront, becoming one of Seattle's most highly regarded public sculptures.

In 1968, dancer Mary Staton used a set of Chase's giant wooden circles for her choreography. The dancers rocked upside down in enormous wooden arcs, and spread-eagled like spokes inside wooden hoops, wheeled across the stage of the Seattle Opera House. In collaboration with Boeing
Boeing
The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

, Chase produced Circles, a computer film based on the spinning hoops.

King Screen made a film of the dance and sculpture collaboration. Chase requested and received footage edited out of the King Screen film, and from the cut footage, made her own film, Circles II, with the help of film professionals Bob Brown
Bob Brown
Robert James Brown is an Australian senator, the inaugural Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens and was the first openly gay member of the Parliament of Australia...

 and Frank Olvey. Using color separations that showed the dancers and sculpture as color forms, Chase used time lapse so that trails of light followed the wake of dancers' arms and legs. The film was acclaimed at the 1973 American Film Festival
American Film Festival
American Film Festival is a film festival held annually in October in Wrocław, Poland. First edition was held from 20 to 24 October 2010. The festival is organized by Stowarzyszenie Nowe Horyzonty and co-funded by the Wroclaw Municipality and Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.-...

 in New York with critic Roger Greenspun comparing it to Matisse's Dance painting.

At about the same time Circles II was in production, Chase created prototypes of kinetic sculptures for children, made of shaped urethane foam encased in tough, bright-colored fiberglass cloth. The shapes were designed for kids to help them with equilibrium and body awareness.

Midlife evolutions

After 28 years of marriage, Chase filed for divorce, ready to live alone and devote herself to art. She moved to New York in 1972. She rented room 722 at the Chelsea Hotel, which, since 1883 had been a residence for artists, including Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...

, O. Henry
O. Henry
O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter . O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.-Early life:...

, Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...

, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...

, and Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

. Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

 died there, while Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

 wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey there. Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...

 and Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...

 were in residence when Chase arrived.

Impressed with Circles II, school administrators at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 invited Chase to teach a graduate-level course in the film and video department. She declined, not wanting to be tied to anything other than creative work.

The Age of Video

Chase began working in video in the early 1970s, using computer imaging, when video art was new. She began by integrating her sculptures with interactive dancers, using special effects to create dreamlike work.
Victor Ancona said of Chase's dance videos, "Watching her tapes gave me the feeling of being transported to an enchanted, phosphorescent environment unceasingly in flux, a voyage I will long remember". The "phosphorescent environment" that so impressed Ancona was the Northwest's iridescent light shown for the first time as art turned video.

Chase formed a romantic and professional relationship with composer George Kleinsinger
George Kleinsinger
George Kleinsinger was an American composer from San Bernardino, California, best known for his collaboration with Paul Tripp on the 1940s children's song "Tubby the Tuba". He also wrote the music for the phonograph record Archy & Mehitabal and the Broadway musical based on the record, Shinbone...

, and he composed the music for 12 of her videos.

As a video artist, Chase lectured and showed her work abroad under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, for whom she traveled to India, Europe, Australia, South America, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

Women's Lives

In the 1980s, Chase used video to explore other concerns such as a divided mind using a split image, multiple superimpositions suggesting compromises, the drift mode suggesting insecurity. In Glass Curtain (1983), actress Jennie Ventriss anguished over her mother's mental and physical deterioration from Alzheimer's disease.

Chase's most widely shown work is a series of 30-minute video dramas regarding older women's autonomy, titled By Herself. Table for One (1985), stars Geraldine Page
Geraldine Page
Geraldine Sue Page was an American actress. Although she starred in at least two dozen feature films, she is primarily known for her celebrated work in the American theater...

 in a voice-over monologue of a woman uneasy about dining alone, followed by Dear Papa (1986), starring Anne Jackson
Anne Jackson
Anne Jackson is an American actress of television, stage, and screen.-Life and career:Jackson, the youngest of three sisters, was born in Millvale, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Stella Germaine and John Ivan Jackson, a barber who ran a beauty parlor...

 and her daughter Roberta Wallach. The third video was A Dancer (1987). Still Frame (1988) featured Priscilla Pointer and Robert Symonds. Sophie (1989) featured Joan Plowright as a woman who has just left her philandering husband to become "Sophie, reader of French tarot cards". The first two videos were presented at the Berlin and London Film Festivals in 1985 and 1986. Dear Papa won First Prize at Paris' 1986 Women's International Film Festival.

In 1993, Chase produced a video documentary about her home, the Chelsea Hotel
Hotel Chelsea
The Hotel Chelsea, also known as the Chelsea Hotel, or simply the Chelsea, is a historic New York City hotel and landmark, known primarily for its history of notable residents...

. The Chelsea Hotel was originally conceived as New York's first major cooperative apartment house, owned by a consortium of wealthy families in 1883, becoming a hotel in 1905. Chase's video paid tribute to the building's 110th anniversary, and those who have called it home.http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5330

Parke Godwin's novel A Truce with Time (1988, Bantam Books) is a fictionalized version of Chase's life during her New York years. While he was writing it, Chase made her own film about their relationship, Still Frame, produced at the American Film Institute. Art historian Patricia Failing also wrote a book about Chase, Doris Chase, Artist in Motion: From Painting and Sculpture to Video Art (1991, University of Washington Press).

Full Circle

In 1989, Chase returned to Seattle, dividing her time between the East and West Coasts, working on video in New York and sculpture in Seattle. She began works in glass, sometimes combining it with steel.
In 1999, her four-piece bronze sculpture Moon Gates, 17 feet high, was installed at Seattle Center. New York's MoMA acquired her complete video and film works. The Seattle Art Museum
Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, USA. It maintains three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the central Seattle waterfront, which opened on...

has only one Chase work in its collection: a 1950s oil painting.

Director

  • Glass Curtain (1990) (V)
  • Sophie (1990)
  • A Dancer (1988) (TV)
  • Still Frame (1988)
  • Dear Papa (1986)

Writer

  • Glass Curtain (1990) (V)
  • Sophie (1990)
  • Still Frame (1988)
  • Dear Papa (1986)

Cinematographer


Books


See also

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