Freson Manifold, 2019 acrylic on masonite and MDF
South Shore Arts is excited to feature Jon Merritt’s exhibit Geometry Forward, in the Atrium Gallery at The Center for Visual and Performing Arts through March 5, 2023. Merritt’s playful desire to make art with geometric shapes, once fostered in the local scene of Northwest Indiana, grew into an obsession and was rigorously formed into a technical discipline. After over a decade of countless experiments, Merritt intends to present a point of resolution in a continuous creative process.
This exhibition brings together two bodies of work: One series emphasizes symmetry and a striving for the balance of a central core, while the other advances a new model of uneven synthesis, strictly constraining such order and having dissolved any center.
Firedog Tiron
Jon Merritt lives and works in Rockport, Maine, and on Plum Island in Massachusetts. He completed his MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 and his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2012. Originally from Munster, Indiana, his passion for painting and geometric abstract art was born while working with artist Tom Torluemke at Uncle Freddy’s Gallery during high school. His influences include science fiction, 20th-century modern art, furniture design, voxel-based video games, and pre-modern examples of geometric design and furniture construction. Assisted by refined woodworking and computer graphics skills, his current work is divided between populating ongoing painting series and realizing his vision in new media.
Artist Statement:
Soxin Manifold, 2019 acrylic on masonite and MDF
My longest-running series of works are my “Manifold” paintings. I adopted the term “manifold” from its mechanical meaning in an abstract sense - that of a kind of atrium form for intake or output. It is a type of architecture for the division or regulation of energy and matter. There is furthermore a mathematical manifold, and the word can also be an adjective describing the quality of being “numerous.” These paintings hung at eye level and often become mask-like, staring back at the viewer as if artificially alive.
One day I knew I wanted a robust definitive series like my Manifolds that were not perfectly symmetrical, so I had to think very differently. Artworks in my Firedog series of paintings and digital projects represent trail markers in an ongoing transformation. “Firedogs” are geometrically styled, but they are also adorned and equipped with geometric compositions atop their backs. A single “Firedog” is a site of geometric art production: During open-ended sketch sessions, abstract designs haphazardly spawn in a chain of expressions from head to tail, and once completed, these designs are rarely edited before being meticulously executed to preserve the thought process.