GRAHAM
GILLMORE
THOM MERRICK
Recent Works
October 15th – November
15th, 2003
Opening Reception: Wednesday October 15th, 6 - 9pm
Kenny Schachter ConTEMPorary
14 Charles Lane, NYC 10014
t. 212 807-6669 f. 645-0743
www.RoveTV.net schachter@mindspring.com
Between West
and Washington Streets Perry and Charles Streets
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Kenny Schachter conTEMPorary is pleased to announce
a showing of new works by Graham Gillmore and Thom
Merrick.
Graham Gillmore was born in Vancouver,
Canada in 1963, and attended the Emily Carr College
of Art and Design. He has shown his work in Canada,
Italy, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere. He
has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in the last
ten years and was included in the latest Art Basel
fair.
In his works on Masonite, Gillmore paints the surface
with enamel, and the colors appear suspended in motion,
simultaneously fixed and freely bleeding. In a number
of these pieces, he brushes on the enamels in a crisscross
fashion, creating a layered grid of color. He carves
words into the surface of the Masonite with a router
and usually paints inside the crevices to highlight
the letters upon the melding, glowing enamels. In
pieces like Boo Fucking Hoo, Gillmore offers his distinctive
reversals, puns, and musings up for the viewer to
take in.
In other works, Gillmore paints interconnected
bubbles containing letters and combinations of letters.
The tangled, rambling matrices are executed on sheets
ledger paper mounted on panels. As with alphabet soup,
the floating letters can be anything from ambiguous
to suggestive, as the eye wanders and the mind follows.
Whatever meaning there is behind their creation, or
whatever meaning there is to be found in them, Gillmore’s
piles of Babel prove to be extremely engaging works
of art.
Thom Merrick was born in Sacramento,
California in 1963. Since graduating from the San
Francisco Art Institute in 1986, he has had over thirty
solo exhibitions. Merrick is known for his “Interventions,”
for which he traveled around the world and set up
site-specific installations at the request of curators.
After spending more than a decade as a roaming artist
without a studio, he is now settled in New York. Over
the past few years, his paintings have been shown
in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.
In the paintings on display, Merrick
layers animals, vegetation, and other natural entities
with meandering dark branches. Large quadrupeds are
seen grazing and peering through the branches in some
pieces; while in others, hands and briars weave through.
Two swans show up in one canvas, one hooking its neck
over a roaming humanoid limb.
In strokes that are alternately bold
and subtle, these imagined scenes of nature are both
naïve and graceful. Each composition achieves
depth and resonance through Merrick’s use of
shadowing, contrasts, and the tension that exists
between the static and the kinetic forms. The result
of Merrick’s latest foray into painting is a
group of balanced, beautiful, and mysteriously magnetic
pictures.
—Benjamin Berlow
