Thomas Doyle

Los Angeles

Working at a scale of 1:87, Doyle’s sculptures are miniature worlds that mine human experience, emotion and remembrance. Each work describes in meticulous detail some sort of undefined catastrophe besieging a previously utopian suburbia—demolished white-picket fenced abodes, trains colliding into homes, and houses that are isolated on islets or turned completely upside-down. Scale model military figures surge onto some of the scenes, compounding the disaster and presaging the ensuing trauma, while Lilliputian men and women obliviously carry on with quotidian tasks amidst the dystopian domiciles. Doyle’s minutely detailed works elicit almost irresistible inclinations for storytelling—what is occurring here? What happened prior? What will be the outcome? But, Doyle’s aim is not to describe any particular event or teleological narrative. The most powerful takeaway is the description of anxiety, insecurity and fear of the unknown imprinted upon the human psyche in the aftermath of adversity.

As the viewer looks down to behold the tiny, calamitous world before them, there is a contradicting experience of omnipotence and insignificance. Looming over the miniature worlds, often encased in a vitrine or compressed in a bubble, there is a dominance in passively observing these inscrutable vignettes of family, home, destruction and ruin. This power gives way to impotence upon realization of the fact that the nondescript men, women and locales pictured in these vignettes are really stand-ins for us: mock-ups of the unpredictable world we all coexist within.

Thomas Doyle

LeBasse Projects

June 22 – July 20, 2013
6023 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
USA

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