VIEWING ROOM: Adrian Meraz
Artist Talk May 26. 2022
View Recording
Artist Talk PDF
EXHIBITION LINKS:
Blind Buzzard
Collar Works
You Stand on the Ground Floor
Infinite Uncertainty
Adrian Meraz (b. 1971, Los Angeles CA)
Meraz holds a BFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA (2000) and an MFA from Yale University, School of Art - Sculpture, New Haven, CT (2005). He was awarded the California Community Fellowship Foundation Grant (2003) and the Saul & Sally Fifer Berenstein/Friends of Joe Mugnaini Award (1998, 1997). Meraz has had solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2004), 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2005) and with Leo Koenig (2-person), New York, NY (2009). His work has been shown in various group exhibitions over the past two decades. Adrian Meraz lives and works in Saugerties, NY.
appendice (in the wake), 23 7/8 x 16 3/4 x 12 3/4 inches, Wood, plywood, matte acrylic paint, copper, copper wire, screws, nails, 2021
Sculptural Work 2020-2021
griddle (interline & demodulate), 19 1/2 x 25 5/8 x 17 inches, Wood, paint, twine, linseed oil, screws, nails, 2021 (views from front & back)
“There has been a certain continuity of ideas and material inquiry throughout the years of making work. The earlier work borrowed from the language of performance. While not specifically laden in performance itself, I thought of the work in the context of motion, transformation and memory, where the ambulatory nature of sculpture/installation became the terrain for these ideas. I would consider the earlier work to be more ephemeral in nature and reliant on the materiality of the piece to add to its context. The later work expanded this field with the use of personal/found objects, more concrete, with monochrome/muted tones and multicolored sections.”
“ The work spans a space between motion/paralysis and embracing the oddness that can take place in the everyday. In some ways I have regarded my practice as a way to thread together the nature and relationship of things. I sometimes think about technology's control of the image, how this correlates with the speed of things and future histories. I like to think of the work not as just object/drawing but as a place/multiplicity that unfolds over time.”
- Adrian Meraz
Studio View
Drawings 2020-2021
"While these drawings relate peripherally to my sculptural work, they are a detour. For several months I relocated to another state to be closer to my partner’s family due to the pandemic. Without knowing how long I would be out of the studio, I felt the most adaptable way to continue making work was through drawing. I find lined/ruled paper to be humorous in nature, with its consistency of line after line, even with the aberration of text or drawing within its page of lines. I wanted to reassemble these lines, change boundaries, and alter its framework." - Adrian Meraz
These works were exhibited in
“Infinite Uncertainty (Regional artists respond to turbulent times)”,
Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College, Albany NY, Sept-Oct, 2020
“I could say that my whole practice is equivalent to drawing. The sculptures and drawings have a similar methodology insofar as they are approached using elements and gesture to articulate their space. The drawings, however, allow me to work serially whereas the sculptures are more individuated. I use painting and drawing to intersect sculpture as a form of repetition; to delineate and mark by way of abstraction and color fields. I think of these surfaces as distortion, interruptions, volumes and voids.”
- Adrian Meraz
Work-in-Progress, Studio View
Untitled (wormhole), 43 x 21 1/2 x 16 3/4 inches, Wood, metal, paper, paint, wax, screws, 2017
2009-2019
“Although I do not consider my work to be about language I do like thinking of the work as a structure within the indirectness of language; within the world of subtext. I find that there is a certain level of freedom in making sculpture. It can be many things and not necessarily categorical. Perhaps the titles I give each piece are akin to the idea of a curtain raiser/prelude or could very well be the postscript. I have found that a notch of humor is inescapable within the work and titles. The titles can be both clinical and playful. I think of the work as having a sonic quality”.
-Adrian Meraz
sonar’s Feast, 2006
Nocturnes, 2005
2000-2005
“The sculptures and drawings modulate between abstraction and narrative forms, footnoted with the familiar and incomprehensible. The transposition of like materials with found and personal objects is structured as a means to explore difference, systems of organization and how sculpture/object/drawing embeds itself within the virtual”.
- Adrian Meraz
Droopiculus Puffinacea
dimensions variable, paper bags, paper, wire, zip ties, wood dowels, 2002
Installation View
