Rondo — the title references the descriptive term for a musical composition with a recurring refrain--illuminates the glass panes of a Main Street storefront with high-definition images of the bioluminescent mushrooms concurrently blooming in digital print one block east. These mushrooms were also the prevailing thematic image in The Underglow, Doyle’s animation that was projected onto a snow canvas in Stockholm. “The bioluminescent mushrooms from The Underglow continue to sprout,” explains the artist, “but now they are removed from the earth, the source of their life. Projected in a new context, the window brings another dimension to the project. A circular aperture suggesting a lens amplifies the idea of a view into another realm.” By incorporating elements from a 20th-century Louis Sullivan window, Doyle combines culture, nature, and technology in an ephemeral form integrated in the city’s infrastructure. This virtual stained-glass window creates a portal into the natural world of today, where the organic and the virtual merge within the built environment.

“The bioluminescent mushrooms are like little bits of technology, living and glowing off decay, a powerful example for us to learn from,” says Doyle. “By bringing them together with the physical structure of the building, I thought about historical examples of nature and architecture. Louis Sullivan came to mind and in researching natural motifs in his work, I happened upon a stained glass window for a bank in Iowa. Combining the idea of the lens, and its evocation of the experimental with the animated rose window form is a way of embodying the tension between the sacred and the systematic. The stained glass window has always been a way of harnessing the power of nature to illuminate the condition of being human.” Alice Gray Stites, Curator.