| David Merritt’s works have a subtle aesthetic and conceptual strength. He examines the relationship between the visual and the aural, particularly as they co-exist in language. The exhibition david merritt: sham at the Art Gallery of Hamilton features his drawings, rope sculptures, and video. Though these media offer diverse visual manifestations, Merritt’s theme is pervasive. He has been working with the semiotic concerns of language, meaning, and indexicality for several decades. His minimal and delicate aesthetic is highly memorable and consistent across media. Merritt derives the content of his “chart drawings” from databases of popular music. |  |
Melissa Bennett
David Merritt’s works have a subtle aesthetic and conceptual strength. He examines the relationship between the visual and the aural, particularly as they co-exist in language. The exhibition david merritt: sham at the Art Gallery of Hamilton features his drawings, rope sculptures, and video. Though these media offer diverse visual manifestations, Merritt’s theme is pervasive. He has been working with the semiotic concerns of language, meaning, and indexicality for several decades. His minimal and delicate aesthetic is highly memorable and consistent across media.
Merritt derives the content of his “chart drawings” from databases of popular music. He researches words that are common in pop songs, such as “hey,” and diagrammatically maps the plethora of songs that begin with this word. The word “hey” is drawn at the left of a large sheet of paper, its presence a seed for an explosion of associations. Drawn lines connect the words that follow “hey” in lines of songs. One may or may not be able to decipher the connections within the dense layering of marks that comprise this chart. This large-scale drawing resembles an automatic drawing or doodle, its gestural quality evoking spontaneity. Upon close viewing, its intricate construction becomes apparent. Process and duration are evident. Interwoven lines, supplemented by many erasures, place an authoritative yet absurd order on the content of pop songs. As Merritt writes, “the thematic of these drawings are also chosen to playfully inflect the ambiguous intimacies of both language and the recorded music they serve to index.”
Merritt’s signature sculptural works are also on display. Delicate forms are made from unraveled lengths of sisal rope, suspended in the air and visually battling the tensions between heavy and light. A new work is a nebulous tree-like form approximately 15 feet in length and width, and 12-feet high. This hovers just above the gallery floor suspended by invisible threads. Smaller sisal sculptures, positioned throughout the gallery, also incorporate language. Hidden amongst the tangle of unraveled fibers are a few carefully molded strands that form letters and words like “and,” available as surprise discoveries for the detail-oriented viewer.
Like Merritt’s chart drawings, the rope sculptures unpack and reorganize elements of popular culture. The words of popular songs take on new meanings once absurdly categorized in this way. In many ways Merritt’s work explores the binaries of what is natural and organic versus what is a cultural construct, such as language. Language can be a tenuous form of communication. By separating words from their familiar contexts, Merritt draws attention to this in a most effective way.
The exhibition david merritt: sham was developed as a variation of a touring exhibition of Merritt’s work which was originated by Museum London. The show sham takes its title from the exhibition tour title shim sham shimmy, which refers to a dance made popular in the 1920s. When a group of people from different cities get together to perform the dance, their steps are similar yet varied and sometimes improvised, like Merritt’s work on exhibition at several institutions in Canada.
