Surface to Air / Thomas Doyle

Here is an exhibition by Thomas Doyle, an artist based in New York. Thomas’ work derives from his training as a painter and printmaker. From his early childhood, he had a fascination with scale models. He is a 2008 West Prize finalist and a 2009 MacDowell Colony Fellow.

Location:
LeBasse Projects
Culver City, California
November 12th – December 17, 2011

images from resident photographer, Taiyo Watanabe

With this new exhibition Doyle continues his Distillation series, which explores an uncanny intersection between destruction and domestic life. Doyle sculpts in a small scale to create model worlds that upend the laws and assumptions of our real one. In “Surface to Air,” houses hover safely above their ruined and burnt foundations while soldiers huddle below. A family goes about its business inside a home that has been cleaved in two. A subterranean house juts from the earth, as a family trudges through an ash-strewn landscape above. Reflective of the apprehension endemic to our times, Doyle’s works also communicate a timeless longing for the stability of home, hearth, and family.

“Surface to Air” will also debut Doyle’s new Foregone series, consisting of photographic portraits of the child figures that feature prominently in his sculptural work. Measuring just a few millimeters high, each figure is hand painted and then photographed in an enlarged format, revealing detail unseen by the naked eye. Coated in a patina of microscopic debris, the figures reveal the limitations and random nature of painting while evoking the tenderness and anxieties of childhood.

Photography by: Taiyo Watanabe