David Merritt
Compensation, 1979
Compensation, David Merritt, 1979
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Compensation (detail), David Merritt, 1979
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Compensation was the first project I produced after art school when I took up a live-in studio in downtown Toronto in 1979. The work involved photographing people picking up a nickel left on the sidewalk outside the building.
In hindsight the work seems a reflection of the sense of dislocation I felt shortly after the move, as much as a response to the newfound neighbourhood itself (the studio was located in a derelict storefront surrounded by the towers of the city’s business district). As such Compensation can be seen staging, in personally fraught ways, a common triangulation of desire: image ← dream → money.
In hindsight the work seems a reflection of the sense of dislocation I felt shortly after the move, as much as a response to the newfound neighbourhood itself (the studio was located in a derelict storefront surrounded by the towers of the city’s business district). As such Compensation can be seen staging, in personally fraught ways, a common triangulation of desire: image ← dream → money.
David Merritt’s practice seeks out the intermediary spaces between cultural and naturalsystems. His process-driven, conceptually oriented work develops from the material possibilities of drawing’s expanded field. Projects in drawing, sculpture, installation and electronic media have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, the Textile Museum of Canada and TENT CBK, Rotterdam. A touring survey exhibition of mid-career work, shim/sham/shimmy, was circulated in 2010 by Museum London in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Merritt lives in London, Ontario, where he is Professor Emeritus at Western University.
