Lindsay Merrill – Moving Targets
Lindsay Merrill – “Moving Targets”
Curated by Vincent Vanden Bogaard
12th December 2024 – 14th February 2025
Solito – Galleria S2
NEA – Via Costantinopoli 53 – Piazza Bellini 59, Naples
Opening Thursday 12th December 2024 – 7 p.m.
The 2024 program of Solito Galleries is completed by the opening of the American artist Lindsay Merrill’s solo exhibition, entitled Moving Targets, curated by Vincent Vanden Bogaard. Merrill presents for the first time in Italy a selection of new works created specifically for the Galleria S2 in Piazza Bellini.
In this latest body of work, Lindsay Merrill renders a number of seemingly divergent subjects – car fires, crucifixes, gun shops and Christmas lawn ornaments – to create a portrait of rural America that is at once bucolic and full of angst, torpor and contradiction
The paintings present scenes from the artist’s home in rural West Virginia and recall the work of American Precisionist painter George Ault (1891 – 1948), both in their exacting, detached style and in their austere portrayal of pastoral America. In Crosses, three gray crosses stand erect beside a phone pole on an otherwise unremarkable hill. In Fire, an enormous RV burns on the side of a highway, its blackened body sending plumes of noxious smoke into a blue sky. In We Buy Guns, Merrill depicts a gun shop in her neighborhood. Once itself a home, the converted building is covered in an array of plastic American flags and vinyl signs, the latter of which showcase its wares so enthusiastically that the potential for violence seems more like a promise.
Amidst these scenes, Merrill has interspersed depictions of Christmas lawn ornaments. These objects, which were popularized in the United States during the mid-20th century, translate old world religious symbols into 20th century American materials – molded plastic – and iconography that converts saints and martyrs into smiling, three-dimensional cartoons. Their friendly shapes, which often betray the violence of their origin stories, appease American tastes, and their scale and materials point to broader American economic aspirations for a particularly suburban lifestyle. In the world Merrill has crafted, the figures become quiet witnesses to the changing realities of American life even as they seem to forecast impending collapse. This tension is best exemplified in the show’s namesake, Moving Targets, in which an elaborate rooftop scene of Santa Claus in his sleigh sits atop a shuttered gun shop in golden afternoon light.
The blow mold figures featured throughout the work are conspicuously devoid of their characteristic glow, except for one figure in the aptly titled Shine. Here, Merrill reimagines Henri Rousseau’s La Guerre (1984), transforming his female protagonist into a plastic reindeer galloping across a meadow and a fiery horizon. The bright, leaping figure has an agency and self-possession that is absent from the figures populating Merrill’s other scenes, yet does little in the way of offering any concrete solution to the encroaching flames.
While all the figures in Moving Targets can be interpreted as quiet observers to the changing realities of American life, the suite of paintings more broadly engages with the notion of impermanence. In doing so, the images are not just conceptions of the artist’s mind, but are instead a legible face of a morphing American culture and landscape. The sharpness of Merrill’s brush and sobriety of her gaze invites us to peer closely into her scenes as if we might find respite in some hidden, illuminating detail. The artist, however, denies us this frivolousness. Instead, Merrill’s paintings confront us with the things and places we think we already know – main street shops, roadside memorials, and decorative holiday cheer – and she invites us to see them in all their strangeness, mystery and foreboding.
Lindsay Merill and curator Vincent Vanden Bogaard will both be present at the opening.
Lindsay Merrill (b. 1987, Redwood City, CA) received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MSW from the University of Denver. Recent exhibitions include Wax Moon Faces at Scroll in New York City and Another Night at Smart Objects in Los Angeles.
Lindsay Merrill lives and works in Philadelphia and West Virginia.
Vincent Vanden Bogaard (b. 1986) is an esteemed Belgian curator with a full-bodied and important resume and an independent consultant who has developed over time a strong knowledge and strategic vision for companies in the contemporary art market.
Solito Galleries will be part of the first edition of Napoli Gallery Weekend, set to take place from the 13th to the 15th of December 2024. This three-day event, dedicated to contemporary art, will feature joint openings of renowned Neapolitan galleries that have significantly shaped the city’s contemporary art landscape. Alongside the opening of “Moving Targets” by Lindsay Merrill at the historic Galleria S2 in Piazza Bellini 59, visitors can also visit “The Itch“, by Morteza Khakshoor at Galleria S1, located in the former Lanificio complex in Piazza Enrico De Nicola 46. The initiative is in continuity with the publication of the Contemporary Art Galleries in Naples 2024 map, still available for free at our locations and other outlets.
Solito Galleries’ formula includes the relaunch in the new guise of the Solito brand, a small holding company that manages a digital platform (awardee project of a ministerial call for Cultura Crea) and the iemme publishing project born in 2011. The project of re-branding and repositioning of the brand and the visual outline is curated by Milan-based Hapto Studio. All initiatives are promoted on the website galleriasolito.com. We thank Lanificio Digitale, the open innovation HUB, which has created the digital platform to support Solito’s activities, and ANGAMC – National Association of Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries.
Lindsay Merrill – “Moving Targets”
Curated by Vincent Vanden Bogaard
12th December 2024 – 14th February 2025
Opening Thursday 12th December 2024 – 7 p.m.
Solito – Galleria S2
NEA – Via Costantinopoli 53 – Piazza Bellini 59, Naples
Monday – Sunday > 10 a.m. – 12 a.m.
galleriasolito.com | info@galleriasolito.com
Gallerie Solito – 081 304 19 19
Communication and press editor-in-chief: Marco Polito
