The dust stirs and rises quickly from its surrounding detritus, particles colliding wildly, glistening in the hard glare of a halogen spotlight. They drift through a crumpled vent and settle atop a pair of white antlers. Dirt sparkles beautifully when it’s disturbed.

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Ryan C. Doyle’s apocalyptic sculptures populate downtown’s Superchief Gallery as part of “Triptych: Trippy Threesome,” a three-man show with artists Lyon Doyer and Darth Lloyder. It is an uncanny landscape of ruin in which the flotsam has constructed itself into semblances of life, a small skulled assemblage flaps robotically in a corner. Parked outside the gallery music drifts from the “CarCroach”: part car, part cockroach. The doors are sculpted into inky legs and corrugated pipe tentacles sway with the beat. It’s “Real Love” by Swans: When I dream that sweet dream, when I forget where I am.

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In the gallery, there is a shadowy bedroom. The walls hang with silicone heads and are lined with shelves of horror movies on VHS cassettes: Friday the 13th Part 3, Halloween 4 and 5, the Child’s Play series. There is a neatly made bed—made undoubtedly for a psychopath. I don’t like scary things. I could never sleep here. I can never sleep in any case because I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid I will be devoured by the monster that has been breeding miniature monsters under my bed, and now they’re crawling in my walls growing restless in the dark. “This could totally be my room,” a bubbly brunette laughs behind me. She seems normal.

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Your hand on my shoulder, pulling me down. It croons on, creaking under the weight of the now stoned crowd clambering atop it and scurrying into the CarCroach like cockroaches themselves. My friend is among them. (He wrote a haiku about it: The show was okay, I got two free beers and weed, go there if you can.)
Pulling me down, into the cold dead earth. He reaches for my shoulder. He flips his red hair from his face, exhales a smoky cloud into the air. There’s no spotlight here to make it sparkle.

“Ping-pong at Tony’s?” he suggests.

 

Photos by Nadia Dougherty