Chris Doyle: Scenes from the Underglow and Rondo, Louisville
artwithoutwalls is presenting two new site-specific installations by Chris Doyle in downtown Louisville: Scenes from the Underglow, still images from an animated video projection originally shown in Stockholm, fill a series of Main Street facades between 6th and 7th streets, and Rondo, a new animated video projection, is visible from dusk to dawn on the storefront of 707 West Main Street.
The virtual renderings of the bioluminescent mushrooms exhibited on Main Street were featured in Doyle’s video animation that was projected in a snow-covered public park adjacent to the US Residence in Stockholm during February and March 2011. Commissioned by Ambassador Matthew and Mrs. Brooke Barzun, Chris Doyle’s The Underglow created a fairy-tale world emanating virtual luminescence, an immersive, multi- dimensional work made from ephemeral sources.
“On my first visit to Stockholm,” says the artist, ”I learned — over a dinner that included Chanterelles—that Sweden is a country of fervid mushroom lovers, and that hunting for mushrooms is an often solitary pursuit. Having long been intrigued with the idea that as a fungus, the mushroom does not photosynthesize, I did some reading on the subject. I love that they are born of decay. When I stumbled upon the bioluminescent mushroom varieties, the project began to take shape: I imagined a field of bioluminescent mushrooms, glowing like a field of LEDs, glowing and pulsing.”
Now that its snow canvas has melted, The Underglow’s animated mushrooms are blooming in larger-than-life two-dimensionality in Louisville, transforming these 19th- century façades into a surreal vision of nature entwined with the cityscape. While the original video celebrates Scandinavian winter by exploring light sources not dependent on our sun (bioluminescence, firelight, and starlight), these Scenes are teeming with the verdant fecundity of spring and summer in the Ohio River Valley.
Rondo — the title references the descriptive term for a musical composition with a recurring refrain--illuminates the glass panes of a Main Street storefront with high-definition images of the bioluminescent mushrooms concurrently blooming in digital print one block east. These mushrooms were also the prevailing thematic image in The Underglow, Doyle’s animation that was projected onto a snow canvas in Stockholm. “The bioluminescent mushrooms from The Underglow continue to sprout,” explains the artist, “but now they are removed from the earth, the source of their life. Projected in a new context, the window brings another dimension to the project. A circular aperture suggesting a lens amplifies the idea of a view into another realm.” By incorporating elements from a 20th-century Louis Sullivan window, Doyle combines culture, nature, and technology in an ephemeral form integrated in the city’s infrastructure. This virtual stained-glass window creates a portal into the natural world of today, where the organic and the virtual merge within the built environment.
“The bioluminescent mushrooms are like little bits of technology, living and glowing off decay, a powerful example for us to learn from,” says Doyle. “By bringing them together with the physical structure of the building, I thought about historical examples of nature and architecture. Louis Sullivan came to mind and in researching natural motifs in his work, I happened upon a stained glass window for a bank in Iowa. Combining the idea of the lens, and its evocation of the experimental with the animated rose window form is a way of embodying the tension between the sacred and the systematic. The stained glass window has always been a way of harnessing the power of nature to illuminate the condition of being human.”
Scenes from the Underglow and Rondo were made possible in part with the generous support of Brown Forman, and of Brooke Brown Barzun and Matthew Barzun, United States Ambassador to Sweden.
About Chris Doyle
Chris Doyle is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to recent solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and at The Taubman Museum of Art, his work has been shown at The Brooklyn Museum of Art, MassMoCA, P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, The Tang Museum, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Sculpture Center, and as part of the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
50,000 Beds, a large-scale, collaborative video installation involving 45 artists was presented simultaneously by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, ArtSpace, New Haven, and Real Art Ways, Hartford. His work has been supported by grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, NYSCA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the MAP Fund.
His temporary and permanent urban projects include LEAP, presented by Creative Time, Commutable, commissioned by The Public Art Fund, as well as recent commissions for Culver City, California, Tampa, Florida, Kansas City, Missouri, and Austin, Texas. He received his Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from Boston College and his Masters in Architecture from Harvard University.