Leigh Merrill

Collecting Forests

May 28th - August 21st

Collecting Forests is a series of large-scale digital collages exploring the construction, idealization, and loss of our environments through images of the forest. Responding to our current era where the entirety of our world is affected by humans, Merrill considers how our ideas, values, curiosity, fears, destruction, and expectations are projected into our increasingly endangered forests. 

Merrill’s images are neither real nor absolute fiction; they point to a complicated relationship to the environment, a combination of what exists and what is desired. The images, poetically situated between reality and simulation, depict forests as dioramas, theatre sets, and wallpaper. These images become a metaphor for forest loss and the faint replicas that remain of these landscapes. The images Merrill creates are views from within a forest, presenting specific but not landmark locations, contrary to a distant, expansive, and authoritative view of the landscape. Each picture is created by digitally collaging hundreds of individual photographs made in forests across the United States. The collection of plants and trees in each image is improbable – a form of digital assisted migration – signaling possibility, connection, and loss.

Leigh Merrill is an American Artist born in 1978. Working primarily with photography, Merrill creates digitally collaged photographic and video works that explore our contemporary landscapes and the impact of desire, simulation, and perception on our environments. Leigh Merrill received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA.

Merrill’s work has been a part of exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad in venues such as the Phoenix Art Museum, the diRosa Art Preserve, The Lawndale Art Center, FotoFest International, the Fries Museum (Netherlands), and the Museum of Texas Tech University. Merrill’s work has been included in online and print publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Afterimage Magazine, Places Journal, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle.

Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Texas Tech University, the University of North Texas Library Print Study Collection, the City of Phoenix, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and various private collections.

Leigh Merrill lives and works in Dallas, Texas, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Texas A&M University-Commerce.