David Merritt
David Merritt works in the areas of drawing and installation. His work has been exhibited in venues across Canada as well as abroad, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Textile Museum of Canada and TENT CBK, Rotterdam. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art and Projects, Toronto. During his residency at Open Studio with the technical collaboration of artist Emma Nishimura, Merritt worked in the area of intaglio to create delicate works on Japanese paper that explore and exhaust his inventory of popular song titles from the last 100 years. A text by David Poolman accompanied the exhibition.
Adopting drypoint offered a degree of intensity and lightness to the work that I could not have achieved with the drawing approaches with which I was previously accustomed. Perhaps most important though in such adventures are the unanticipated outcomes. Having blindly ventured into the strange world of deliberately scratching metal surfaces to produce images has since lead me to a new drawing project, one using the vocabulary of incised marks on large sheets of lead as an end in itself. – David Merritt, Visiting Artist 2008