Jess Merritt’s mixed-media photographs and sculptures may stir the subconscious, but they’re grounded in the Southwest landscape.
Albuquerque, New Mexico / jessmerritt.com / @the_singularity_of_jess
For Jess Merritt, work and practice aren’t just informed by a sense of place, “I link my identity to it,” she says. Born in Roswell and now based in Albuquerque, Merritt explores New Mexico’s landscapes via photography, watercolor, and painted three-dimensional folded paper sculptures, among other media. “I consider the land a friend, a muse, and a teacher, and I spend as much time as possible interacting with and listening to it,” she says.
In her Desert Rorschach series, Merritt mixes altered Polaroid prints with watercolor, creating surreal mirror images of rock formations and sideways blue skies that, like ink blots, invite the viewer to discern meaning in abstract form. In another printing process, Merritt transfers Polaroid emulsion to paper, creating a painterly effect, the image slightly hazy, grainy, and saturated with color, like a place you’d visit in a dream.
Merritt sees the hands-on, experimental, and open-to-error nature of manually processed photography as essential to her practice. She was trained in darkroom techniques while earning a fine-arts degree during the dawn of digital photography in the late ‘90s, when it was still too expensive to be widespread. After graduating, she quickly became disenchanted with the hyper-digitization of the photography field, both in fine art and for consumers. It wasn’t until Merritt bought a DIY pinhole camera kit at Roswell’s Miniatures and Curious Collections Museum that she returned to the darkroom. She writes, “Pinhole cameras provide that perfect balance of technical skill, creative manipulation, and random chance (magic?) that make a work of art successful.”
In Merritt’s paper sculpture work, geometric forms suggest buildings, like a pitched roof house, or different iterations of polyhedrons. She paints on the facets of her shapes (eyes, rib bones, abstractions that echo natural forms like amoebae or anemones) and covers sides or whole pieces with cyanotypes that evoke cloud-filled skies. The sculptures, whether in a gallery or in site-specific outdoor installations, are at once familiar and otherworldly. Though she’s expanded her range, the southeastern corner of New Mexico is home. As Merritt explains it, “If the universe had placed me somewhere else, my work would absolutely be different because I’d be listening to different stories and different histories.”
