Doilies fall into that irresistible category of indeterminate objects: they are at once fancy and cheap. They look great sitting under cakes, making dessert automatically more glamorous, but when we stain them with crumbs and icing we don’t grieve—we know where to find more among their mass-produced sisters and brothers. Matthew Hilyard recognizes and makes the most of the doily’s slippery status, delving into his doily collection to create prints and paintings that spotlight paper lace’s elegance as well as its camp delusions of grandeur. Through precise arrangements, deliberately formal studies in composition, careful color choices and combinations, and sensuous treatment of surfaces, Hilyard produces the “ode to a doily” par excellence with the seriousness of purpose, respect, and sense of humor that these simple/complex objects merit.
Hilyard utilizes the doily’s “natural” good looks and everyday life connotations to make works where the doily is always itself—a decoration for a cake plate or display—as well as an analogue for something else—a character, a shape, a trace image, or an emblem. Often the doily seems to leave the tabletop in order to float in space, sometimes rising like the sun in a sea of color or the moon on a ground of starry glitter, while at other times the painting or paper print’s surface is the tablecloth seen from above where the doilies rest and no longer have their display objects. As arrangements of circular figures on grounds of flat color, these doily works connect to 1960s Post-Painterly Abstraction where artists like Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella focused exclusively on color and shape, and as part of the phenomenon of importing decorative items into high art, these pieces also partake of the legacy of the 1970s Pattern & Decoration movement represented by artists like Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Schapiro. The doily images resemble tableaux as well, for when two doilies are together, meeting alone, they look like lovers in a rendezvous, the gap between them filled with longing. We anticipate their touch, and much like Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s works with two mirrors side by side or two identical clocks perfectly in sync (significantly subtitled “Perfect Lovers”), the doilies parallel same-sex lovers or an ideal of romantic love where two people are so similar that their intimacy is boundless.
In works with multiple doilies, the lacey circles seem to move across the space, rolling like a ball or overlapping in a stutter, a kiss, or the mitosis of cells. Images with other kinds of paper lace come across as delicate screens, curtains, or wrought iron fencing through which gardens and private spaces are made more enticing; they even bring to mind a lace veil over a face or lace stockings stretched over a thigh. Hilyard’s application of glitter to the doilies, patterned lace, and backgrounds functions like the doily in our lives, adding another layer of luxury and dazzle to our fancy occasions, comparable to make-up or a sequin dress. The glitter also adds to the confusion of whether the doilies and lace forms are a presence or an absence, a trace of what was once there or a completely two-dimensional representation of objects that are actually, although barely, three-dimensional. When the doilies and paper lace appear occasionally as collage elements, the spatial orientation becomes even more uncertain. Once again we face indeterminacy, but within the alluring realm of surfaces where glitter, doilies, and their ghosts intermingle—a birthday party reverie where we confront and meditate on the status of everyday objects.
Genevieve Waller
August 2009
Genevieve Waller is a Ph.D. student in the Visual & Cultural Studies program at University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. She is originally from Wichita.
