- May 14, 2010 to June 26, 2010
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Merritt Johnson's new work at grunt gallery investigates perceptions of division and confluence where land and sky meet. Johnson's work both constructs and dissolves the landscape, concrete and imagined, measuring the absurdity of boundaries, borders and territories. Referencing mapping, her work also surveys sky by layering, revealing and inverting ideas of earth and sky, Johnson reveals information encoded not in GPS systems but in indigenous knowledge.
By Merritt Johnson - Curated by Tania Willard
artist | 2 Programs
Artists Merritt Johnson- September 7, 2018 to October 20, 2018
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In conjunction with the Textile Society of America conference being held this September in Vancouver, grunt gallery presents Woven Work From Near Here, curated by Emily Hermant and T’ai Smith. Inspired by traditional weaving practices—including Indigenous methods for weaving blankets and baskets alongside structures and patterns that have come from elsewhere—the exhibition presents recent experiments by artists who live and work near here. Juxtaposing materials and methods, the works in the show stretch what it means to be a woven textile. The curators understand being “near here” as a spatial and temporal condition that defines the region currently known as the Pacific Northwest—a mesh of overlapping Indigenous and Settler cultures, legal-political systems, and territories. To live, work, and weave near here is to contend daily with the legacy of colonial settlement and expropriation. Marked by the dislocation of Indigenous weaving traditions between the early decades of the 20th century and the 1980s—decades after the Potlatch ban in Canada was lifted in 1951—the region has seen the re-emergence of this conceptual, functional, aesthetic and spiritual form. At once capacious and precise, new developments in weaving signal the potential of this practice to realign protocols and values.
By Debora Sparrow, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Hank Bull, Jovencio de la Paz, Kerri Reid, Matt Browning, Melvin Williams, Merritt Johnson - Curated by Emily Hermant, T'ai Smith