Daughter: Lindsay Merrill

Enari is pleased to present Daughter, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Philadelphia and West Virginia based artist, Lindsay Merrill; her first with the gallery. In her latest body of work, Merrill revisits her subjects of taxidermied deer, domestic interiors, and scenes of contemporary rural Appalachia in a series of arresting and startlingly rendered images that explore the American landscape as a place of profound beauty and brutality. 

In Czeslaw Milosz’s poem, Dawns (New and Collected Poems, 1931) the poet writes:

Not Enough, One life is not enough, 

I’d like to live twice on this sad planet, 

In lonely cities, in starved villages, 

To look at all evil, at the decay of bodies, 

And probe the laws to which the time was subject, 

Time that howled above us like a wind.”

One might consider Merrill’s paintings as offering a similar promise of sight. The suite of eight paintings—drawing influence from a wide range of techniques and traditions, from European naturalism to twentieth-century American realism—are set in a Miloszian condition of perpetual longing. The artist renders her subjects through a quality of murky light that one encounters in the upper latitudes and altitudes of the eastern North American continent. The artist’s two landscapes, Gas Station and Town both share a distinctly myopic line-of-sight where a parking lot and a suburban road operate as cultural and pictorial dead-ends with a sign reading “GUNS” in the former and the blood-red setting sun in the latter, respectively. They are sobering irrespective of their diminutive size, yet so too are Merrill’s more luxuriant depictions of deer and trophies. 

In The Farmer the artist has cropped out most of her main subject leaving only a stag’s antlers, casting an elongated shadow across a cream-colored wall. Framed on the upper-left we find a sun-bleached copy of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1560 painting “The Fall of Icarus.” Composed as a highly divergent account of Ovid’s story, Bruegel paints a diminutive Icarus, his legs thrashing as he drowns in the sea. In the foreground a farmer blithefully attends his plow seemingly unaware of or unconcerned with the unfolding tragedy before him. Here Merrill highlights Bruegel’s ethical concern; that indifference to the suffering of others is endemic to the human condition. The sight of death is also apparent in two additional paintings, both entitled Head on Wall, in which the artist depicts trophy stags in domestic interiors. The majesty suggested in the stag’s contrapposto—curiously directed toward the viewer—is diminished by the unremarkable condition of their domestic surroundings, reducing their once authoritative gaze into a look of desperation and bewilderment. With Merrill’s taxidermied deer we are reminded that their bodies, after having been maimed, have consequently been tended to and sewn up in order to obscure the lethal violence they suffered—a kind of violence that after all, is not particularly remarkable in the United States. 

Daughter is the largest painting of the presentation and the piece from which the exhibition takes its title. Here, the artist depicts a dark wooden-clad bedroom and milky-white bed on which we are confronted by an elegantly reposed doe rendered in nearly one-to-one scale by means of astonishingly crystalline brushstrokes. The painting asserts its own verisimilitude, insisting that we encounter this ghostly subject as a real event. Equally perplexing are the subjects in Stag and Fawn where we encounter an adult and infant deer settled on a couch and armchair, respectively. As in Daughter, we confront the subjects head on, though here their gaze is directed distantly “off-camera”. Are these deer alive, or are they also trophies? The realism with which Merrill renders the animals lends her subjects a naturalism that contradicts the sturdiness of their posture. Through the act of painting, the artist transports her subjects into the realm of the living, thereby conferring onto them a kind of second life. The show’s title, Daughter, further amplifies this transference of life by giving her non-human subjects the dignity of genealogical lineage that we only attribute to ourselves as humans. Do deer not also have children, siblings, and family? Do they not also mourn the death of their daughters, fathers and kin? 

The artist has attributed the influence of Greek mythology and to Ovid’s Metamorphosis in particular on her work, writing of the “certainty in a mysticism that cannot be easily explained and is thus merely experienced as fact.” Similarly, ideas of fact—or moreover, of truth— can be considered through the early Christian understanding of the nature of art and icon painting, and the function of light in painting. According to the Russian theologian Pavel Florensky, it is light that makes contemplation of a subject possible, as it is light that both reveals and is revealed by and through the image of beauty. Merrill thus imparts a pathos to her subjects in a manner that only painting can afford. In Daughter, as in the other portraits of deer—dead or not—Merrill maintains the tradition of painting as a life-giving and life-affirming force; painting as a recourse to the inevitability of death, as a promise for everlasting life. When Milosz says “I want to live twice on this sad planet”, the painter responds “you can.”