March 7 - April 27, 2024

Opening Reception: March 7, 2024, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Anna Von Mertens’s exhibition Elements and Objects, which brings together two new bodies of work created meticulously with colored pencils on black paper. One series references the cosmos while the other is sourced from the digital world. Both speak to how these abstract realms are tangibly present in our everyday lives.

In her series Remnants, Von Mertens devised an iterative process to create each drawing that references the generative life cycles of stars. She arranged tangles of jewelry on sun-sensitive paper into forms reminiscent of cosmic phenomena. Exposing these arrangements to the sun, a chemical reaction occurred anywhere sunlight hit the paper, creating a record of both where the jewelry was in full contact with the paper and where the jewelry lifted slightly from it. Von Mertens used these patterns of touch points and slippages as sketches, then refined them into finished drawings using metallic pencils against black backgrounds. This step-by-step creation is a testament to the connection between all things - each of us is a slow gathering of stardust - yet with each step the preceding steps recede.

The three drawings from Von Mertens’s continuing series Objects (100 Emojis) use pattern to animate the symbols that populate our phones. In one drawing, items of mending, tending, cutting, and repairing repeat in a diagonal cascade. In another, the repeated shapes of four emojis are arranged to echo the geometry of the traditional Tumbling Blocks quilt pattern. Giving these objects hours of attention with her careful rendering, Von Mertens offers the reminder that these images in our phones are as much a part of this world as anything else. We share the same ecosystem.

In both aspects of her show Von Mertens finds value in pulling remote worlds closer, making distant realms feel more present. Experiencing a broader perspective helps make the connections we build precious, and create value in our human existence.

Anna Von Mertens was born in Boston and currently lives and works in New Hampshire. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and BA from Brown University. Most recently Von Mertens exhibited a solo show in 2018 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA); in 2023 this exhibition Measure then traveled to the University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. MIT Press will be publishing a book on her expanded Radcliffe project in September 2024. Other recent exhibitions include a 2013 Rijswijk Textile Biennial (Netherlands), 40 under 40: Craft Futures at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery (Washington, DC) and the 2012 DeCordova Biennial (Lincoln, MA). Von Mertens's work is in the permanent collections of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery (Washington, DC) and the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design (Providence, RI), among other institutions.