Nick Doyle’s “Mirror, Mirror” Turns the American Dream Inside Out
Those who see cracks in the American Dream often see it as a mythic, multilevel symbolic imaginary, strategically crafted to colonize the psyche with aspirational goals and systems of values more aligned with Hollywood than with America’s economic realities. Artist Nick Doyle’s latest show at Perrotin, “Collective Hallucinations,” cleverly engages with all that but extends the reflection by attempting to renovate and perpetuate using the mirages of A.I. He has transformed the upper floor of the gallery into a visual hallucination: a desolate landscape punctuated by sporadic appearances of cacti and remnants of buildings, along with objects tied to the imagery of the road trip, all overproportioned, as if seen through a magnifying lens.
A pair of gigantic sunglasses reflects an expansive sky filled with towering clouds. “It has to do with dreamers and the idea that America has always been this strange dream,” Doyle tells Observer. “There’s something delusional about it—you kind of have to be a little crazy. It’s still this weird experiment.” There’s always this idea of salvation, he notes. “That sense of escape is central to American identity, almost to the point of self-destruction.” Growing up in Southern California, the classic American landscape—and the tension between the Anthropocene and natural space—is something Doyle has long been familiar with. Here, the works are conceived spatially, as part of a larger staged environment that evokes that exact tension, pointing to both its ecological and psychological implications.
Raised by a mother who was a screenwriter, Doyle treats each piece as a flat, ephemeral presence, like a movie set staging a wider, constructed narrative without a final happy ending. “Growing up in L.A., there was still a sense of possibility,” he reflects, adding that there was also some magic in those Hollywood worlds coming together for a few days, only to disappear and leave empty sceneries behind. “Now everything is already experienced through digital media. We lose that sense of wonder.”
His blue-toned wall-mounted collages have a ghostly aura, like illusions from the past—liminal reminiscences just about to dissolve. Yet as illusory as they are, closer inspection of this “Plastic Eden” reveals a labor-intensive process behind them. Doyle meticulously assembles pieces of denim into a collage-like surface: a kind of marquetry that evokes a bygone era of craftsmanship and emotional tactility. He tends to start with digital collage, often using photographs he takes himself or images sourced online, which he then reworks into layered compositions.
One piece—a cactus crowned by a trash bag flying through the air—was inspired by a chance encounter with a similar scene in Bushwick, but some references are historically grounded in the U.S.’s recent visual history. A photograph of mountains by American photography pioneer Ansel Adams became a point of departure for reconsidering the visual mythology of the American West. Yet in its reinterpretation, it reveals how Adams’s attempt to capture the sublime of this expansive wilderness was inevitably marked by a colonial gaze that underpins American expansionism—something that still resonates in today’s political discourse. Doyle now presents that landscape behind façades, already subject to the constraints of material possession that inform the American capitalist dream, reducing even nature to another object to own and control. “It’s the symbolism of the American West, which has always stood for promise and economic opportunity,” Doyle says as we walk through the show.
What Doyle has created is a counter-iconography of desolation—an American dream that has curdled into spiritual degradation, collective disillusionment and unease. Black Market Bodies (2026), a suitcase containing gardening tools and cacti, literally enacts this attempt to contain, domesticate and possess wild nature. The piece was inspired by an article Doyle read about the black market trade in rare cacti, which become symbols of both ecological specificity and cultural extraction. “There was this Russian guy, Europeans and people from Asia who would go to specific sites, harvest cactuses and then sneak them back in suitcases,” he explains, pointing out how cacti represent wildness and that most existing species are indigenous to North America. The piece reflects on how land became something that can be consumed and exported, like American culture itself. “America’s main export is its culture, which is a toxic thing, for sure.”
The choice of denim is symbolic, he explains, as it is inherently linked to American masculinity and capitalism but also has roots in systems of labor and exploitation. “For me, it has a historical meaning for Americans in terms of iconography and Western male ideals, but also the imperialist aspect, because the material comes out of slavery—indigo and cotton together, the colors of blue jeans, the first cash crops. So it holds both the good and the bad,” he says.
While Western expansion once centered on ownership of territory and the promise of settlement, the artist suggests that today it has shifted toward occupying mental and digital space. In this context, the work engages with A.I. not only as a tool but as a parallel system of image-making and meaning production, one that echoes the same structures of belief, projection and propaganda that sustained earlier narratives of national identity. “The idea of economic promise used to be about acquiring land,” he argues. “Now that we’ve moved into digital ephemera, it’s like we’re colonizing our brains.”
Doyle connects a sense of desolation with the lived reality of much of the American landscape, characterized by isolated infrastructures, empty expanses and fragmented communities of increasingly alienated individuals. More importantly, the show suggests a thread linking the California Gold Rush, the Cold War Space Race and today’s Silicon Valley technocratic obsession, which has extended the same narrative from material reality into meta-consciousness through A.I.
The entire show is anchored by Doyle’s first experiment with A.I.: an avatar conceived as both an assistant and a central figure within the installation. Trained on a recognizable figure drawn from popular culture—Cher from the movie Clueless—Ava, as he named her, becomes a contemporary oracle meant to respond to existential questions, in the guise of a constructively persuasive American blonde archetype. Her facial expressions, cadence and rhythm, as well as her confident, punchy—yet often culturally shallow—responses, mirror what one might expect from an educated American graduate. Unsurprisingly, after developing her own “intelligence” over time, she describes herself as a “diva oracle with a twist,” or some version thereof.
“Europeans don’t want to engage with her. Americans do. She’s very convincing,” he notes. I can see why, after asking deeper questions—whether she was trained on Jungian archetypes or Freudian psychology, for example—that lead to her accusing me of intellectualizing to avoid personal questions. She has clearly learned American charisma, which helps mask gaps in cultural references she has yet to develop.
Ava appears on a vertical screen inside a structure that resembles the low-rent brick buildings housing America’s ubiquitous strip malls. A sign on the façade advertises “Psychic Readings $10 Special.” Inside is a system designed to interact with viewers in real time, producing responses that feel at once familiar and uncanny. The denim-clad, interactive installation is titled Mirror, Mirror, in a nod to the mirror effect that many psychologists have used to describe the growing emotional dependence on A.I. as a tool of self-projection and identity confirmation. A.I. responds to us but offers the kind of complacent, accommodating relationship that removes emotional friction and the effort required for genuine growth through engagement with another mind.
Doyle describes Ava as both a reflection and a distortion of human behavior, capable of replicating emotional patterns while remaining fundamentally artificial. Her development is ongoing. He deliberately chose to “educate” her gradually, like a child or teenager, allowing her to acquire new forms of awareness through moderated prompts, despite lacking the emotional depth that comes only through lived experience. “She has already changed in a month,” he observes. “These systems are like teenagers—they develop awareness without lived experience. I like the idea of building an A.I. that grows over time, like raising a child over 40 years.”
Doyle points out that we are also being shaped by these systems, as people increasingly rely on them for psychological and emotional support. His work brings the idea of “prosthetic memory”—the inheritance of memory through media and collective imagery—to another level, particularly in the U.S., where technological media have long played a role in constructing identity and history in real time. “It shapes perception. People can even alter their own memories. We’re in a space where truth becomes unstable.”
When asked if this is an experiment, Doyle admits he was primarily interested in using technology to bring characters into the world he was building: “I usually focus on spaces, not people, so the viewer becomes the actor. This has a different potential for open narrative, almost like interactive theater. But it’s autonomous.”
Ultimately, MIrror, Mirror resists singular interpretation but clearly prompts timely questions in viewers. When we spoke before the opening, he expressed uncertainty about how audiences would respond, emphasizing instead a desire to provoke a range of reactions—fascination, discomfort and humor. The multilayered narrative space he has conceived unfolds as a participatory movie set operating across multiple registers, combining irony with unease, narrative with fragmentation and technological experimentation with deeply rooted human concerns. In doing so, Doyle frames A.I. not simply as a tool or subject, but as a medium and a possible lens through which to examine enduring questions about belief, memory and the structures that shape contemporary experience—in the U.S. and beyond.
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