David Merritt
June 11, 2011 — July 16, 2011
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David Merritt Detail: untitled (lonely) , 2011 pastel, graphite and watercolour on paper
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Opening reception
Saturday June 11 from 4 to 6 PM
Artist in attendance
Drawing is David Merritt’s principal medium. Even his unravelled sisal sculptures may be considered drawings in space. Beneath the delicate organic structure of his work lies a surprisingly rigorous conceptual mapping in which language plays a critical role. In the mid 1990s his interest in language began to encompass the popular idioms of song titles and lyrics. Working from an extensive archive of recorded music, this work came to explore the frequently ambiguous relationships between image and sound, literacy and the oral and inscription and performance. Tracing commonplace themes from across music industry inventories of more than forty years, Merritt’s drawings give play to dynamic processes of generation and decay. Familiar phrases break up and accumulate or are dispersed and redistributed in unanticipated and sometimes humourous combinations. Increasingly writing, mark making and, most recently, colour, cross interchangeably in Merritt’s work.
Words also find their way into Merritt’s sculptural work, intricately woven and often barely visible within the unravelled sisal rope strands he forms into ephemeral evocations of sound and movement. In its physical and gestural qualities and play upon the random and ordered, Merritt’s work brings together natural and cultural systems, two fields traditionally thought of as mutually exclusive. As curator James Patten writes in the recent survey exhibition catalogue of Merritt’s work “Merritt re-inscribes a drawing practice with meaningful references to culture and, in so doing, locates drawing within the real world of everyday experience. In this sense Merritt’s music charts define a territory of the familiar. What Merritt maps with song titles is the space of contemporary global culture rooted in twentieth-century communications technology including radio, film and the recording industry.”
David Merritt’s works are found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Museum London, and in several private collections. A ten-year travelling survey exhibition and catalogue was organized by Museum London in 2010.
Artists:
David Merritt