SOLO EXHIBITION OPENINGS:
Leigh Merrill and Claire A. Warden
Leigh Merrill
Claire Warden
FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025, 11-5 | EXHIBITION OPENINGS
Candela is excited to begin the 2026 calendar year with two solo exhibitions using process to explore ideas of contemporary humanity.
In the front gallery, Dallas-based artist Leigh Merrill’s Lost Pine, Double Pine brings the viewer into an alternate universe of mysterious cotton candy colors and echoes of reality. The exhibition includes works from her series, Garden of Artificial Sugar and Thesaurus of Air, which utilize digital collage techniques to reshape perception of natural and urban landscapes.
Through a painterly system of consistent color and texture, lush vegetation and geometric storefronts stretch farther from our familiarity while growing closer to one another. Merrill’s meticulous digital collages highlight a friction between the simultaneous visual reverence and physical encroachment of humankind with the existing environment:
Familiar elements such as the lawn, manicured and manipulated plants, and new buildings that mimic other eras and locations, reveal a culture of perpetual longing. The urban landscape is often a post-modern offering of architecture, simulating or referencing different periods or locations. This simulation reveals the desire for what is referenced, and the majority of our landscapes - built for the car and continuous growth – embody an aspirational forward momentum within their infrastructure. My photographs and videos seek out this longing and desire while echoing the cultural, historical, and perceptual forces that impact our experience of place.
In the back gallery, Phoenix-based Claire A. Warden’s Mimesis reframes the urge to ask “what am I looking at?” within a larger context of ethnic identity. The large, monochromatic alternative process works blur the lines of photography, inviting the viewer to question their experience:
Reflecting on the perception and presentation of identity informs my approach to photography. I spit on and manually manipulate silver halides in the photographic negative as a representation of the inherent natural and cultural forces in a self-aware and conscious existence. This process produces an image that reveals a certain truth in identity and its inadequacies in language. The abstractions resembling systems of the natural sciences—microscopic, topographic and celestial—allegorizes the complexity of systems that make up an individual and the perception of oneself.
Mimesis spills into the small back room with a projected video piece by Warden.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leigh Merrill is an American Artist born in 1978. Working primarily with photography, Merrill creates digitally collaged photographic and video works that explore our contemporary landscapes and the impact of desire, simulation, and perception on our environments. Leigh Merrill received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA.
Merrill’s work has been a part of exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad in venues such as Paris Photo (France), Centre de la photographie Genève (Switzerland), the Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona, United States), the diRosa Art Preserve (California, United States), FotoFest International (Texas, United States), the Fries Museum (Netherlands) and the Museum of Texas Tech University (Texas, United States). Merrill’s work has been included in online and print publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Afterimage Magazine, Places Journal, Dwell.com, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle.
Claire A. Warden (b. Montréal, Québec) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in still and moving image media. Her work engages and challenges representation, portraiture, racialized experience, and language in the United States through abstraction and experimental image-making in multi-year projects. She received a BFA and BA from Arizona State University and a MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, where she received a New Artist Society full merit scholarship.
Warden’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Pictura Gallery, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and The University of Kansas Art & Design Gallery. She has been named LensCulture's Top 50 Emerging Talents, Photo Boite’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, and a Clarence John Laughlin Award finalist. She received an Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a Puffin Foundation Grant, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Contemporary Photography Exhibition award and the Ed Friedman Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography.
Her work has been featured in publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Real Simple magazine, Der Greif Magazine, Strange Fire Collective, Prism Magazine, Lenscratch, Diffusion Magazine and Light Work’s Contact Sheet.
Warden was awarded artist residencies through the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, Art Intersection, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, LATITUDE, ACRE, and Light Work.
On Thursday, January 22, join us for an artist talk with Leigh Merrill for Lost Pine, Double Pine. RSVP HERE
Claire A. Warden will be joining us on the first Thursday and Friday of February, so stay tuned next week for further event details!