ON VIEW APRIL 29, 2022 – JUNE 19, 2022
Emmett Merrill’s work uses the lithographic printmaking process to create narrative prints which combine Americana imagery with that of myth and legend. The prints deal with the emptiness of the American landscape, the derivation of ghost stories and local legends, objects of Art History, and the culture surrounding the highway system. The work also explores how time can move within a single visual space, similar to the way hieroglyphs exist as a contained image, but can be read in the same fashion as words on a page. Objects and foliage appear scattered along the ground in the works, as if a tornado whipped through a gas station and a history museum and all their artifacts landed together in the same field.
The collection of works shown here in the exhibition Dead Deer are a series of visual ghost stories, each exploring the theme of nature colliding with human-made spaces, like a deer bursting through the windshield of a car. Nature in this case isn’t just the idea of foliage, animals, or wide open landscapes, but also the presence of death as a natural (and sometimes supernatural?) part of life. Deer along the side of the highway manifest this ghostly symbol. Driving at night, you just make out their form as you speed by, wary eyes illuminated by headlights. Yet it seems more common that we see deer dead than alive, victims of our cars and freeways.
Throughout this group of prints on view, ghosts are also embodied as geese crashing into a bathroom window, a figure with mismatched socks under a sheet, or mysterious footsteps in the snow, walking away from someone who’s slipped beneath the ice. For the artist, these and all ghost stories are an exploration of the uneasy feeling of the unknown, not just the cliche of not feeling alone in a dark room, but also the excitement and anxiety of entering an unfamiliar building, landscape, town, etc. The curiosity and unease we sometimes feel when we lack experience with something new, or when our experiences don’t align with others’, is palpable here–and so is the feeling that perfect understanding may be outside of our grasp.
In his study of Kentucky folklore, Ghosts Along the Cumberland author William Montell recounts the tale of a farm worker who comes across the ghost of a cow he had put down the previous week. He sees it in the field, goes to get his family, and when they return to see the spectacle, the cow is gone... and that’s the end of the story. To Emmitt Merrill, the works in Dead Deer are a similar kind of short, temporal "ghost story”. They don’t represent any kind of cautionary tale. Instead, they simply record the moment when someone in their day-to-day life experiences the absurd, and, when they try and share it with someone else, that thing is gone.
Nightmares and dreams, history and progress, ghosts and legends: in America (and everywhere), we rarely experience any of these in exactly the same way. However they strike you, we hope you’ll enjoy the prints that bring together these moments in Dead Deer, and that their stories will linger in your imagination for a long time to come.
Emmett Merrill is an independent artist-printmaker hailing from Kansas City, Missouri and living in St. Louis. His work uses lithography to explore topics including ghost stories, the American Highway system, and art history. He is a collaborator with artist collective and fine art print shop, Grafik House, where he self-publishes his work. Merrill received his BFA in printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His work is included in numerous public and private collections in the U.S. and internationally, most notably the Library of Congress and the China Printmaking Museum.
Dead Deer opens to the public on Final Friday, April 29th for a reception with the artist from 5-9pm. The exhibition remains on view through June 19. Wonder Gallery hours are Thursday–Sunday, 12-6pm.
Artist website: emmettmerr.wixsite.com/mysite
Instagram: @stagprint
