Jessica Murray Projects, located at 210 North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is please to announce In Private by Chris Doyle.

For many years, Doyle has explored issues of public and private space, class and aspiration in his public artworks. Titled, In Private, this exhibition brings together an ongoing series of watercolors that he begun in 1998 while working on these projects. Turning to the investigation of his own personal experience of domesticity, Doyle began to examine the unsettling chapters of his own childhood. Before high school, his family moved more than seven times. He worked with these memories to recreate whatever he could recall of each of these nearly temporary homes: an arrangement of bushes, a blue sports car, an open garage door. From this starting point, Doyle began to search for homes that reminded him of the ones he had lived in as a child. He traveled to many areas around the United States collecting images from places including Binghamton, NY, Boynton Beach, FL, Albuquerque, NM, Lexington, KY and his high school hometown, Moscow, PA. Doyle shot photographs and collected real estate catalogs assembling a rich source of specific imagery from which he could sample. From this collection, he developed his first body of work, a catalog of small watercolors, each one depicting a specific home.

For his second body of work, he enlarged the format of his paper and selected tiny details from his expanding catalog of images placing them on a mostly empty sheet of paper. A modest suburban house landscaped with palm trees and decorated with a pine wreath, a serene yet ominous in-ground swimming pool, a solitary abandoned lawn chair. Converting the unused white sheet into an empty landscape, Doyle creates a juxtaposition of personal place with the void, highlighting the anxiety associated with unfulfilled domestic expectations. Together these poignant passages capture the disjointed psyche of the American landscape.

Doyle has enjoyed recognition for many of his public art projects. Highlights include: Commutable, where he gold-leafed the steps to the Manhattan entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge (Public Art Fund); Flock, an installation of barbeque-cum-sheep for Socrates Sculpture Park; and LEAP (Creative Time) a projection in Columbus Circle of people (who live on the ends of the subway lines) jumping up towards the sky. His installations and video works have been included in exhibitions at PS 1, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Queens Museum of Art, and The Sculpture Center.

In the drawing room, Jessica Murray Projects is also pleased to present Nearby Nowhere by Lila Subramanian. A cross-pollination between 19th century landscape painting and contemporary advertising, these iris prints are created by manipulating the artist’s photographic negatives of landscapes and seascapes. By removing manmade elements and performing other alterations, Subramanian discovers a prehistoric, untouched place. Inserted into these familiar, yet seemingly exotic settings, are people posed as if to sell you a vacation, a novel or participation in the latest chapter of the self-help movement. While her figures seem completely contemporary, their relationship to the landscape recalls historical paintings by such artists as Jean-Francois Millet. Subramanian’s spinning of visual metaphors creates exquisite locations for the viewer to project their own reality.

In Private and Nearby Nowhere open on Friday, February 8 with a reception from 6-8 PM and will run through March 10. Gallery hours are Friday – Sunday, 12 – 6PM. For more information contact Jessica Murray at info@jessicamurrayprojects.com or 718.384.9606.

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