Those who see cracks in the American Dream often view it as a multi-layered, mythical, symbolic fantasy, strategically designed to colonize the psyche with ambitious goals and value systems more in line with Hollywood than with American economic reality. Artist Nick Doyle’s latest show at Perrotin, “Mass hallucinationsinteracts intelligently with all of this, but expands the scope of contemplation by attempting to renew and perpetuate with the mirage of artificial intelligence. He turns the top floor of the gallery into a visual hallucination: a desolate landscape punctuated by sparse appearances of cacti and building remains, along with objects associated with road-trip images, all hyper-proportioned, as if seen through a magnifying glass.
A pair of giant sunglasses reflects a vast sky filled with towering clouds. “It’s about dreamers and the idea that America has always been this weird dream,” Doyle tells the Observer. “There’s something so delusional about it, you have to be a little crazy. It’s still a strange experience.” He points out that there is always this idea of salvation. “This sense of escape is fundamental to American identity, almost to the point of self-destruction.” Doyle grew up in Southern California, and the classic American landscape—and the tension between the Anthropocene and physical space—was long familiar. Here, the works are conceived spatially, as part of a larger theatrical environment that evokes this subtle tension, and suggests its environmental and psychological implications.
Raised by a mother who was a screenwriter, Doyle treats each piece as a flat, ephemeral presence, like a film set offering a broader, constructed story without a definitive happy ending. “Growing up in Los Angeles, there was still a sense of possibility,” he says, adding that there was also some magic in those Hollywood worlds that came together for a few days, only to disappear and leave behind empty landscapes. “Now everything is actually experienced through digital media. We have lost that sense of wonder.”
His blue-hued wall-mounted collages have a ghostly aura, like illusions from the past – liminal memories about to dissolve. However, despite being fake, a closer examination of this “plastic Garden of Eden” reveals the labor-intensive process behind it. Doyle meticulously assembles pieces of denim into a collage-like surface: a kind of marquetry that evokes a bygone era of craftsmanship and emotional touch. 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 crowned cactus with a trash bag flying through the air—was inspired by a chance encounter with a similar scene in Bushwick, but some of the references are historically grounded in the United States’ recent visual history. The image of mountains, taken by American photography pioneer Ansel Adams, became a starting point for reconsidering the visual myths of the American West. However, in his reinterpretation, he reveals how Adams’s attempt to capture the splendor of this vast wilderness was inevitably characterized by a colonial gaze that supported American expansionism—something that still resonates in political discourse today. Doyle now presents this landscape behind the facades, already subject to the constraints of material possession that constitute the American capitalist dream, reducing even nature to something else to own and control. “It’s the symbolism of the American West, which has always symbolized promise and economic opportunity,” Doyle says as we tour the display.
What Doyle has created is an antidote to ruin, an American dream transformed into spiritual decline, mass disillusionment, and unease. Black market entities (2026), a bag containing gardening tools and cacti, literally embodies this attempt to contain, domesticate and own wild nature. The piece was inspired by an article Doyle read about the black market trade in rare cacti, which have become a symbol of environmental exclusivity and cultural extraction. “There was a Russian guy and Europeans and people from Asia who would go to specific locations, harvest cacti and then sneak them into suitcases,” he explains, noting that cacti represent wildlife and that most of the species found are native to North America. The piece reflects how land has become something that can be consumed and exported, like American culture itself. “America’s main export is its culture, which is certainly toxic.”
He explains that the choice of denim is symbolic, because it is inherently linked to masculinity and American capitalism, but it also has roots in systems of labor and exploitation. “For me, it has historical meaning for Americans in terms of Western male iconography and ideals, but also in terms of the imperial aspect, because the material comes from slavery — indigo and cotton together, the colors of blue jeans, the first cash crops. So it has both good and evil,” he says.
Whereas Western expansion once focused on land ownership and the promise of settlement, the artist points out that today it has shifted towards the occupation of mental and digital space. In this context, the work treats AI not simply as a tool, but as a parallel system of image making and meaning production, one that reflects the same structures of belief, projection, and propaganda that underpinned previous narratives of national identity. “The idea of the economic promise was about access to land,” he says. “Now that we’ve moved on to digital ephemera, it’s as if we’re colonizing our brains.”
Doyle links the sense of desolation with the lived reality of much of the American landscape, characterized by isolated infrastructures, empty spaces and fragmented communities of increasingly isolated individuals. More importantly, the series suggests a thread between the California Gold Rush, the Cold War Space Race, and the technocratic mania of Silicon Valley today, which has expanded the same narrative from physical reality to meta-consciousness through artificial intelligence.
The entire show is based on Doyle’s first experience with artificial intelligence: an avatar conceived as an assistant and central character within the installation. Practice on a well-known character drawn from popular culture – Cher from the movie ignorant– Ava, as he called her, became a modern-day fortune teller aiming to answer existential questions, under the guise of the constructively disguised blonde American model. Her facial expressions, her cadence and cadence, as well as her confident and poignant – but often culturally shallow – responses reflect what one might expect from an educated American graduate. Not surprisingly, after developing her “intelligence” over time, she describes herself as “an oracle singer with a twist” or some version of that.
He points out, “The Europeans do not want to deal with it. The Americans do. It is very convincing.” I can see why, after asking deeper questions—whether she had been trained in Jungian archetypes or Freudian psychology, for example—that led to her accusing me of thinking to avoid personal questions. She clearly learned American charisma, which helped mask gaps in cultural references she had not yet developed.
Ava appears on a vertical screen inside a building similar to the low-rent brick buildings that house the ubiquitous strip malls in America. A sign on the facade advertises “Private Psychic Readings for $10.” Inside is a system designed to interact with viewers in real time, producing responses that feel both familiar and strange at the same time. The denim-covered interactive installation is titled Mirror, mirrorIn reference to the mirror effect that many psychologists have used to describe the increasing emotional dependence on artificial intelligence as a tool for self-projection and identity confirmation. AI responds to us but offers the kind of reassuring, comforting relationship that removes the emotional friction and effort required to achieve real growth through interaction with another mind.
Doyle describes Ava as a reflection and distortion of human behavior, capable of replicating emotional patterns while remaining essentially artificial. Its development continues. He deliberately chose to “educate” her gradually, like a child or teenager, allowing her to gain new forms of consciousness through mild stimuli, despite lacking the emotional depth that comes only through lived experience. “It really changed in a month,” he notes. “These systems are like teenagers, they develop consciousness without lived experience. I like the idea of building artificial intelligence that grows over time, like raising a child over 40.”
Doyle points out that we are also shaped by these systems, as people increasingly rely on them for psychological and emotional support. His work takes the idea of “artificial memory”—the inheritance of memory through mass media and images—to another level, especially in the United States, where technological media have long played a role in the construction of identity and history in real time. “It shapes perception. People can even change their memories. We are in a place where reality becomes unstable.”
When asked if this was an experiment, Doyle admitted that 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 different possibilities for open narrative, almost like interactive theatre. But it’s autonomous.”
finally, Mirror, mirror It resists singular interpretation but clearly raises timely questions for viewers. When we spoke before the opening, he expressed uncertainty about how the audience would respond, emphasizing instead a desire to elicit a range of reactions — fascination, discomfort, and humor. The multi-layered narrative space he envisions unfolds as a participatory film that works across multiple registers, combining irony and anxiety, narrative with fragmentation, and technological experimentation with deep-rooted human concerns. In doing so, Doyle frames AI not as a mere tool or subject, but as a potential means and lens through which to examine enduring questions about belief, memory, and the structures that shape contemporary experience—in the United States and abroad.
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