Thomas Doyle Presents New Dioramas in “If the Creek Don’t Rise”

New York based artist Thomas Doyle invites us to look into another world with his humorous, and often times dark dioramas. First featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 11, and again in our Collected 3 edition, his small-scale sculptures of houses and suburban towns provide an unexpected perspective of domestic life. As Doyle once explained, something has either just happened or is about to happen to their tiny inhabitants that combine the nostalgia of playing with our childhood toys with a sense of foreboding. “My work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller,” he says. “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.” For his first solo museum exhibition at the Hudson River Museum in New York, titled “If the creek don’t rise”, Doyle takes us to a place that he describes as “a gray zone between every day events and calamities that can, at any time, strike a home.” The exhibition includes the debut of two major new works: the first, “Infinite regress”, is a 16 foot long river that has been dammed in two places with mounds of trash and household goods, and “The culminating point”, which consists of 5 works that follow the same piece of land from its sale, construction, through to its destruction and back to cleared land.

Thomas Doyle’s “If the creek don’t rise” will open on February 4th at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, and will be on view from February 6th to May 8th, 2016.