Merridawn Duckler is a poet and conceptual artist who creates sculptures and installations derived from language, story-telling, found materials and dreams. Books & Clothes is a show of artist books, an art genre that considers the book as object rather than subject and art clothing which are artworks meant to be worn on the body. Duckler’s gallery-wide installation invites audience interaction with books whose pages turn, shred and unravel and clothing meant for gallery visitors to read and don. Grounded in Art Brut and naïve aesthetics Duckler’s work pairs humble, everyday materials and processes associated with childhood crafts with high concept executions that reference art history, cultural milieu and the historic avant-garde. Lawrence Weiner calls language “just another material to make visual art” whereas Duckler considers language the sacred repository of visual memory and aesthetic identities that go beyond the self. She is the author of four books and over two hundred published works, winner of the Beulah Rose poetry prize, the Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Memorial Award Woven Tale Press, judged by Ann Beattie, the CNF prize from Invisible City and the Drama prize from Arts and Letters at Georgia College. She’s received grants from Oregon Arts Commission, RACC and residencies across the US.

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The exhibition Intimate Strangers renders quiet encounters between the natural and human-built environment to consider the liminal spaces where two forces meet. The works portray the cyclical dynamics and forced relationships found in spaces intimately inhabited.

The exhibition includes several series of works that each feature letterpress texts printed onto digital photographs.

Two of the series focus on plants that have grown amidst the unrepaired cracks of urban sidewalks and pavement wastelands. These plants reclaim and reinhabit the literal fractures in human infrastructure to tell stories of the cyclical dynamic between life and decay. Cracks in pavement evidence the passage of time; concrete breaks down with wear and weather, opening more ground to further growth. These plants inscribe a new chapter in the material evolution of place as they assert their agency over human efforts to contain and control. The texts accompanying the photographs are broken apart as well, prompting a process of mending through reading.

Another series closely represents groups of lichens and mosses cohabiting on a fallen tree branch. Other works feature still-life arrangements of manmade and natural objects interacting in the same frame.

The series in the exhibition collectively activate conversations between nature and culture, word and image, visual abstraction and representation. The works address the spaces where categories meet, where intimate strangers cohabitate, collaborate, and create.

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Spectral Ascent is an exploration of relational presence, between bodies, human and nonhuman. The works emerge from the experience of looking upward: that moment of awe when scale, and time exceed the boundaries of the individual. In that encounter, perception shifts.

Across mixed media surfaces 2d and 3d sculptural forms, the work investigates thresholds and points of passage. Branches reaching upward. Portal-like structures hold drawn interiors, spaces intimate and inviting.

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