Leigh Merrill has created a new body of work for her exhibit Garden of Artificial Sugar that stems from her meticulous “photographic” process. Often utilizing thousands of individual photographs, Merrill isolates and then manipulates visual elements of nature before seamlessly stitching or collaging each together to eventually fabricate a unique scene. Playing off the fallacy of truth via photography, Merrill creates her own fictional realities that appear as brilliantly colored scenes of (un)natural landscapes. The saturated pigments that now suggest trees, leaves, and other natural elements, appear to sit on the surface of the paper. In some areas the artists manually collages cutout elements onto the surface—further confusing the viewer’s perception of the two-dimensional image, and further pushing the limits of what we qualify as a photograph. With Merrill’s work, what originated as photographs of bucolic flora and funga—void of fauna—have transformed into sugary semblances of reality.

LEIGH MERRILL: Garden of Artificial Sugar is generously supported by Jon Rex Jones, Nancy L. Hallman, Sally & Robert Porter, and Elizabeth & Duncan Osborne.

(Leigh Merrill, Grove, 2023 archival pigment print and collage on Hahnemühle watercolor paper, 34.5 x 43.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and the Liliana Bloch Gallery.)