Dream No Small Dreams
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Ronchini Gallery London will present Dream No Small Dreams curated by Bartholomew F. Bland, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum. The exhibition features work by Adrien Broom, Thomas Doyle and Patrick Jacobs – three New York-based artists known for their depictions of artificial landscapes and alternative realities.
Exploring the renaissance of interest among artists worldwide in constructing small-scale hand-built artificial environments, intricate new worlds are presented in miniature as dioramas, models, sculptures, and photographs. Drawing from a variety of pictorial traditions including the 18th century concept of the Sublime, the Hudson River School and American Transcendentalism, the work of these artists puts the world under a microscope to reflect on the human experience.
Broom’s Frames of Mind series of photographs captures fantastical imagined landscapes created through building miniature sets. Through a cinematic approach to photography, Broom creates illusions that play between reality and fantasy, emphasising the imaginative impulse. Her images are densely narrative, exploring universal themes of childhood, loss and the anxiety of modern life through these constructed scenes.
Doyle carefully sculpts scenes of destruction, disaster and mayhem encased in glass domes. At the centre of his work is the iconic American clapboard house which can be seen teetering on the brink of sinkholes or cut in half horizontally. Figurines are surrounded by apocalyptic chaos yet betraying little emotion in their faces. They trudge along with suitcases or bury the dead, inviting viewers to be absorbed in the crucibles and memories they elicit. His work serves as a metaphor not just for the global economic crisis, but more profoundly for the idea that the traditional American homestead is not the safe haven we all presume it to be.
Jacobs produces miniature sculptures of hyper-realistic environments embedded into gallery walls and viewed through glass portholes. Viewed at close range, his works are lit from within, revealing themselves with fisheye luminosity. Working materials like paper, plastic, acrylic gel and metal, Jacobs constructs three-dimensional landscape dioramas. The idealised, hyper-realistic green expanses characteristic in Jacobs’ work initially seem to provide a respite from the increasingly anxious and paranoid world. The sculptures offer the viewer an isolated view of an attractive alternate reality that always remains eerily out of reach.
Creating work through intense engagement with materials and attention to detail, these artists share a passion for scale and the impact it has on perception.
Adrien Broom (b. 1980, New Haven, CT) lives and works in New York. Broom has lived and worked in London, New York, Florence, and Boston. Recent exhibitions include The Glass Theatre at The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2012) and American Dreamers: Facing or Escaping Reality in Contemporary Art at The Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2012).
Thomas Doyle (b. 1976, Grand Haven, MI) lives and works in New York. Doyle studied at Humboldt State University, Arcata, California. His sculptures have been shown internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities at Musée des beaux-arts Eugène Leroy, Tourcoing, France (2012) and at Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York (2011).
Patrick Jacobs (b. 1971, Merced, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Jacobs studied at University of Klagenfurt, Austria and University of West Florida before receiving his MFA Fine Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include: Patrick Jacobs: Telescopic Vistas, Zadok Gallery, Art Miami Context, Miami, FL (2012); Interiors: From Within Outward, The Pool NYC, Volta NYC, New York, NY (2012); Familiar Terrain, Patrick Jacobs, Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY (2011); Dioramas, Patrick Jacobs, The Pool NYC, Moretti Fine Art, London, UK (2010).
Bartholomew F. Bland is a curator and writer based in New York. He is currently Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Hudson River Museum, where he has curated exhibitions such as Paintbox Leaves: Autumnal Inspiration from Cole to Wyeth and I WANT Candy: The Sweet Stuff in American Art, which toured nationally. He has curated a number of exhibitions and projects at Yale University, Staten Island Museum, New York and the Flagler Museum, West Palm Beach, Florida, and has written numerous essays and articles.
Ronchini Gallery is a contemporary art gallery founded by Lorenzo Ronchini in 1992 in Umbria, Italy, which expanded in February 2012 with a space in Mayfair, London. Its exhibitions have explored pioneering movements within Italy; the gallery aesthetic is defined by Minimalism, Spatialism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera and it retains an unblinking future-focus on progressive movements. Ronchini Gallery evolved from 20 years of private collecting. Paterfamilias Adriano Ronchini was an early supporter of artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Stella and Michelangelo Pistoletto and collected their work throughout the seventies. Subscribing to the highest standards of curatorship and scholarship, the gallery provides a rigorous context in which its artists can be viewed. Ronchini Gallery also maintains a successful publishing arm which produces exhibition catalogues, monographs, critical texts and artist’s books.
