New York based artist Thomas Doyle creates miniature worlds in bell jars. Doyle’s work often deals with the interplay of domestic life and destruction, love and anguish, memory and chaos, frozen in fragile instants and evoking feelings of omnipotence in the viewer, as if he’s recalling an event of the not so distant past.
“My work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past—whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.
The pieces’ radically reduced scales evoke feelings of omnipotence—as well as the visceral sensation of unbidden memory recall. Hovering above the glass, the viewer approaches these worlds as an all-seeing eye, looking down upon landscapes that dwarf and threaten the figures within.
Conversely, the private intensity of moments rendered in such a small scale draws the viewer in, allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or dollhouse. Though surrounded by chaos, hazard, and longing, the figures’ faces betray little emotion, inviting viewers to lose themselves in these crucibles—and in the jumble of feelings and memories they elicit.
The glass itself contains and compresses the world within it, seeming to suspend time itself—with all its accompanying anguish, fear, and bliss. By sealing the works in this fashion, I hope to distill the debris of human experience down to single, fragile moments. Like blackboxes bobbing in the flotsam, these works wait for discovery, each an indelible record of human memory.”
Thomas Doyle’s work is on show as part of the exhibition ‘American Dreamers: reality and imagination in contemporary american art’ at Centro di cultura contemporanea strozzina at the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, Italy from march 9th to july 15th, 2012.
Via: iGNANT and Designboom
