Rachel Merrill

BIO

Rachel Merrill was an athlete once. Her toe-touch-reach won her an achievement award and a certified document from the President's Council on Physical Fitness in 1992. After winning this high achievement, she continues to have a competitive edge by exploring spectacles, American sports, and competition. Merrill's interdisciplinary approach integrates textiles, sculpture, and performance into video projections and installations. 

Merrill received her BA from Northwestern University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and earned her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hill, Michigan. She is a Professor of Art at Grand View University in Des Moines, IA, where she received the Innovation in Teaching and Excellence in Scholarship Awards. She is the recipient of the Iowa Fellowship and Catalyst Grant, made possible by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her work has won several other awards, grants and residencies continuing her reach.

 

Artist Statement

In an act to be something I’m not, I expose what I really am—a stupid good sport. Using American sports competition (organized conflict) as a metaphor, I question the performative demands of womanhood, competition, power dynamics, and manipulation. It’s an observation of pop culture sound bites, public spectacle, and a heavy dose of personal insecurity on instant replay.

These moments and memories of grand stupidity focus on embarrassing, awkward, and painful parts of high-performance spectacles. Deliberately manufacturing garish, tawdry costumes and props, these spectacles compile personas- humorously absurd, ridiculously repetitive, and contradictions of the manufactured self. The repetitive and monotonous work (laboring over the costumes and props, performing pseudo-scripted choreography, and manipulating manufactured video/ photos) is a calculated part of momentary grandeur.