Time Out New York, March 7 - 14, 2002
Chris Doyle
“In Private”
Jessica Murray Projects,
Through Sun 10

Writing about a suburban subdivision under construction in his classic 1966 essay "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey," Robert Smithson notes that this "zero panorama...seemed to contain ruins in reverse." Unlike romantic ruins, however, these suburban dwellings don't "fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise into ruin before they are built." Smithson's observation still raises some generative questions: Are the suburbs "ruins" because each house is a snug island, isolated against time? Or is it because every suburb is, in effect, a memorial to the city whose collective energies it has sapped?

Suburban houses and their outdoor accoutrements - peaked-roof garages; utility sheds; green plastic garbage cans - are the subject of Chris Doyle's precise watercolors, which seem to describe the fabric of suburban time and space. Doyle arranges his architectural taxonomies upon conspicuously empty fields of white paper, which, by obliterating context, act as signs of ruin. In contrast, his small painted areas suggest fragmentary residual memories - like strips of recognizable imagery in an otherwise decayed photograph. All the depicted building elements are infinitely interchangeable, whether from a double-garage ranch-style house with symmetrical windows or a single-garage flat-roof house with a large picture window on one side. Many of Doyle's compositions resemble continuous street views. In a typical work, abstract patches of grass are paired with houses of various styles that sit along a lane. Other watercolors feature architectural remnants that no longer share a common horizon line but rather emerge on the paper like independent chemical reactions.

Doyle's frequent inclusion of skeletal construction sites implies that his drawings might change if we turned our backs - that this limited vocabulary of forms could easily proliferate beyond our control, or our ability to map or remember them. Although Doyle's work seems to begin at a psychological level, registering the effects of suburban architecture on a specific person, his compositions ultimately replace unique memories with prefabricated, reproducible backdrops. – Lytle Shaw

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