303 Gallery is pleased to present Land animal, house animal, Tanya Merrill’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring new works.
Out of my studio window is a Marsh Hawk. Every morning it glides low and slow across the open fields, starting the day with measured intention. My daughter was born in June, her tiny body just another animal emerging in the morning light. Awake all night, awake at dawn, while somehow, somewhere, a couple sleeps soundly, their cat turns and turns and turns, finally settling between them. A horse unburdened of a rider, barely visible in the dark, is free. Without a saddle or shoes, no metal rings when it runs, just the beating of the earth like a drum.
There is an in-between place that opens up in your house when a baby is born, the gap between floorboards widens and you all fall inside and land on a bed made of woven textiles that catch the light, guitar strings chiming harmonics like a bell, and flower buds floating above their stems. You live there for a while until you’re good and ready to come out and the baby cries for something new and reaches for a fruit to hold. So we emerge. We study the plants and animals of our place, the objects of our house like symbols to unfold, and the pictures, songs and folktales from the beginning of time, all waiting to be known.
Tanya Merrill’s work invents narratives to examine humanity’s fraught relationship to nature and cultural portrayals of gender and sexuality through her own contemporary lens. Land animal, house animal has a string of Merrill’s interest in Americana running through it, interlaced with references to historical artworks and impressions of domesticity, motherhood and partnership. Merrill explores her interest in ecology from direct observation at her studio site in the Hudson Valley. Plants, animals and insects enter her paintings as a cast of reoccurring characters. The same hawk out the window every morning, the horse down the road, the columbine flowers bending their heads in the shade, are all familial, meeting in the exhibition alongside intimate portraits of the human figure. Merrill uses graphite and oil paint thinned to mimic her experience of the fluidity and immediacy of painting with watercolors in a sketch book en plein air.