Maya Mercer
UNITED STATES
Instagram @mayamercer.studio
Maya Mercer is a French-American artist. Daughter of radical English dramatist, playwright, and screenwriter David Mercer. Self-taught as a visual artist, Mercer lived and worked most of her life in Northern California where she directed local teenagers in visual stories inspired by the social conditions of the rural American Far West. She currently lives and works in North Carolina. Mercer’s work has been exhibited in galleries, museum exhibitions and art fairs throughout North America, Europe. Her recent shows include “printing futures”, curated by Gerhard Steidl as part of Documenta fifteen (2022) and les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (2023). The Parochial Segments book published by Steidl will be released in spring 2024.
“ Mercer’s subjects are young, beautiful, tragic and playful, and strangely removed from time even as they reflect contemporary stresses and historic memories. While her art echoes the decadence of late-19th century precursors, however, it also looks ahead to a new, perilous age of sensuality, confusion, and encroaching dystopia. In this regard Maya Mercer is less hedonist than oracle, less Salome than Cassandra. Her work is no indulgence; it is a warning.” Peter Frank, Los Angeles
• SERIES •
THE PAROCHIAL SEGMENTS
PAROCHIAL SEGMENTS, despite its implicitly constricting title, opens up the ongoing sequence of photographs Maya Mercer has been compiling of her Northern California neighborhood and neighbors.
The children in these Parochial Segments, slouching towards adolescence, are caught mid-chrysalis, abandoning their innocence and waking to a realization that home is not simply their refuge, but their fate.
This was once “Indian country,” inhabited by Native American peoples who roamed as they could and needed to.
These children have not inherited the land; they have inherited the wind – the fearful, ingrown mindset of those who were able to stay but were not quite able to sustain themselves and had nowhere else to go. And now these children will face a 21st-century version of rejection and isolation, as even the ground will change beneath their feet. In the great Anthropocene die-off, they will be the first to go. Or will they be the last?
Refusing simply to document poverty, Mercer practically paints a picture of the doomed, not simply capturing their aloneness beneath a big, empty sky but infecting her images with what can seem a veil of blood, a persistent red saturation that augurs sickness and death without necessarily conjuring violence. This red can be naturally found in the atmosphere, especially at sunset; but in the intensity it takes on in Mercer’s lens it signals a poisoned ecology as well as the catastrophic immobility of the next human generation. Doubtless, these damned children would rather survive the trials they are, knowingly or not, about to face. So would we all. But they have less to lose than we do — and, living as close to the land as they do, they may prove more resourceful than we are. Wouldn’t it be just if Mercer’s little colony of the prepubescent becomes an oasis in the midst of global environmental collapse?
The term “parochial,” Maya Mercer explains, was used by early Christians to denote their colonies. The Greek-sourced word invokes temporality, and, indeed, it was used to infer that the Christians’ permanent home was heaven.
Peter Frank, Los Angeles
