Leap, 2000, detail [Enlarge in New Window]

Chris Doyle: Leap

Few things in this world go up without coming down but Leap, an outdoor video projection by Chris Doyle, has done it many times. For five consecutive nights in April 2000, between dusk and midnight, Doyle trained the 30-minute video loop onto the windowless façade of a white marble building on Columbus Circle, a major New York City intersection. Passing crowds saw a continuous stream of 420 "superhero-size" New Yorkers of all ages, who one by one jumped for joy straight up the building wall into the stars above.

Leap drew attention from every local media outlet, while film buffs noted certain parallels to a 1954 Hollywood classic called It Should Happen to You. The movie starred Judy Holliday as Gladys, an obscure New York actress who becomes an overnight sensation when an accident of fate causes her name to appear on billboards all over town, beginning with a big one on Columbus Circle. It immediately wins her invitations to all the best parties and admiration everywhere she goes, simply for being "that Gladys."

Silly as it was, the movie presaged the sort of instant fame that would later characterize a culture Doyle saw as lionizing celebrity for the sake of celebrity alone. This was a trend he wanted to counter, having discovered how easily "it" could happen to anyone: in 1996 he too became celebrated for a minute, for gold-leafing the many steps leading to a bicycle path on Manhattan's Williamsburg Bridge. That experience made him more determined than ever to create a monument to what he called "the non-famous," and the result was the buoyant Leap. An almost literal evocation of the transitory nature of life, it also captured the resilient character of Doyle's fellow New Yorkers months before the tragic events of September 11 made it plain to people everywhere.

Doyle's principal criteria for participants, however, was that they live near the end points of the 11 subway lines that converge at Columbus Circle, connecting citizens of every borough in the city. Over the course of three weekends, he interviewed each jumper at the stop nearest his or her home. For a three-month period surrounding Leap's debut, quotes from the interviews like, "I want to own this town," appeared with photos of individual speakers on posterlike subway cards that are usually devoted to commercial advertising. The cards raised the project's profile even more.

Currently based in Brooklyn, Doyle earned a master's degree in architecture at Harvard University and worked for I.M. Pei before turning to sculpture and video. That transition, which accompanied the dissolution of his marriage, is the underlying subject of his first series of videos, Lessons (1998), which were inspired by storybooks that he had been reading to his young daughter. For each, Doyle transformed himself into a different animal - a turtle, a frog, a giraffe - by donning different handmade "houses," or shells, adding performance art to his resumé without really abandoning architecture at all.

Buildings, or various forms of containment, continue to play a central role in his work, most notably in an ongoing series of drawings and watercolors that he began in 1999 to detail the architecture of suburbia. "We moved ten times before I was twelve," he says by way of explaining this obsession. "I got to know a lot of suburbs! " It shows. His houses appear both individuated and flattened by empty white space, beckoning and remote all at once. "I grew up in the world of Formica," he adds. "And I had to believe you could make something out of that life." Indeed, he took a leap from it, keeping his feet on the ground all the while.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | Americana | History | New York | 2000