UCSD Open Studios: Gretchen Mercedes

Gretchen Mercedes

De-peopled wet suits evoke ghostly skins as they sway to the engine hum of a seemingly empty fishing boat; car headlights peer hauntingly through the desert dusk to the edge of the planet; bullet holes and rust serve as reluctant cartographers of the abandoned; Gretchen Mercedes' photos and moving images are cacophonous with silence - the kind of silence that can be heard through the alchemy of motion in motion and time in time; days in cars, in flight, at sea.

Australia, Indonesia, Japan, America, Mexico and the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans; it is no overstatement to say that the artist lives and works globally. Reclusive, Mercedes' images are not documents, but rather poetic products of a life lived outside the confines of studio practice and in and out of marginalised space. Roland Barthes' description of modern poetry as a "kind of spatial, tangible analogue of silence" could be carefully applied to these visual works, which transport the audience not to a fixed destination but to a mobile point of departure from which a number of escapes can be made.

-Glenna Jennings

Biography

Gretchen Mercedes

Artists