david merritt
adavidmerritt@gmail.com

Christie Contemporary
Toronto, ON, Canada
www.christiecontemporary.com
info@christiecontemporary.com
@adavidmerritt
On the Notices and Arber Works

David Merritt

For some time now I have been trying to take notice of things that appear just as readily forgotten. Those I can recall are noted in drawings. I call these drawings “notices”. read more.

SWRV

Ben Portis

Step outside for a walk. An inverted plastic cup presents itself on the sidewalk, like a pylon. Step around it. Seconds later, unseen, it audibly scuttles into the curb. Fallen foliage reveals a previously hidden bird‘s nest, abandoned. Woven amongst its twigs and grasses, a strand of blue ribbon glints in the light. Its frayed tail dangles, dancing up with the breeze. Light overnight snow weighs on the bladetips of grass. In fifteen minutes, the sun will have risen sufficiently to sluff this burden away. read more.

David Merritt

Artforum, Jen Hutton

Since the mid-1990s, the meat of David Merritt's drawings has been written words--the lyrics and titles of popular songs, to be exact--and in his latest exhibition this material generates themes of presentness and loss. From a distance, the collective presence of the works on view here seems to add up to not much more than a whisper, so to appreicate Merritt's fine approach to the medium one must lean in closely. read more.

David Merritt & The Music of Not Listening

Carl Wilson

It was hearing about an application called Shazam that made me finally give in and buy an iPhone. Rumour had it that it let you point your phone at any music playing, say, on the radio or in a shop or bar and, with a swipe of finger over touchscreen, get the song's and artist's names. For a writer about pop music whose superpowers do not include total trivia recall -- and who, for great chunks of his life, didn't pay especially close heed to what was on the charts -- it was an irresistible lure: When "On the Loose" came chugging through the room, I'd be able to make a surreptitious consult and meet expectant questioning eyes with the answer that it was Saga who had to do it their way or no way at all, not any of the other 1970s Canadian chest-hair bands whose names might scissor-kick their way across my brain, like Triumph or Chilliwack or April Wine. read more.

David Merritt: Roping Viewers In

Canadian Art, Sky Glabush

Through 2009 and 2010, David Merritt is mounting a quartet of related exhibitions. Museum London recently hosted the first iteration of the project, "shim," while the second articulation, "sham," is on at the Art Gallery of Hamilton to May 24. A third exhibition, "shimmy," opens at the MacLaren Art Centre on June 12. The series culminates with "shim/sham/shimmy" at the Art Gallery of Windsor on November 20. As seen during "shim" at Museum London, David Merritt's untitled (rope) is a beautiful and evocative sculptural installation composed simply of a piece of sisal rope that has been unravelled strand by strand, reorganized and made to hover above the gallery floor. read more.

Silence / Debris / Duration: Two Works by David Merritt

David Poolman

Song titles are indexical and fragmentary—a short-hand for the music they represent. With just a few suggestive words, song titles can identify, classify, categorize, and summarize their subjects, their genres, their emotions, and their meanings. Over the last few years David Merritt has been collecting and categorizing song titles— all the love songs ever written, the top eleven heartbreak songs, the top ten songs of onenight- stands, and others. His collection fills binders of space. The titles are repetitive, overwhelming, ironic, and at times sadly funny in their similarities and lack of originality. read more.