Nick Doyle: Collective Hallucinations

The visual language of the American Dream draws you in. Desert skies. Saguaros. Mountain ranges lifted from old Westerns and Ansel Adams. All of it quilted together from scraps of old blue jeans — the most American material there is, doing its most American work.

But… One saguaro has a plastic bag caught in its needles. The mountains are framed with chain-link fences and cinder-block walls. A keychain loaded with personal talismans we collect to feel cool and unique, but that make us like others.

From purple mountains majesty to Silicon Valley. At the center of the show is a psychic booth promising $10 readings called, portentously, Mirror, Mirror. Inside is Ava, an AI with the polished friendliness of a hotel receptionist who’s had a long week. Speak to her, and she puts words in your mouth. She has been trained to provoke rage, and she is good at her job.

America, the not-so-beautiful. America, the superstitious. America, still buying the story it’s been selling itself for centuries.

Nick Doyle (b. Los Angeles, 1983) lives and works in Brooklyn. He grew up in Sierra Madre, a small town in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. He got his MFA at Hunter in 2013 and spent seven years at Tom Sachs's studio after. Denim is his medium because, as he's put it, it carries the histories of America — slavery, revolution, the West, masculinity, and fashion — in a single bolt of fabric.