Garden of Artificial Sugar

Garden of Artificial Sugar

Selected Images and Installation Views:

Garden of Artificial Sugar is an exploration of place in the Anthropocene epoch. Through large-scale photographic collages, this exhibition explores the intersection between reality and simulation and the impact of human activity on the environment.

Leigh Merrill's artwork challenges photographic perception and the physical and cultural formation of place. By interrogating the inherent limitations of photographic representation, her work reveals both the desire and simulacrum present around us and within the medium itself. Merrill uses photography and video to observe, making thousands of source photographs and videos on location. Working in her studio, she creates collaged images from this massive database; each work contains up to hundreds of individual sources. These meticulously crafted collages combine disparate elements to create a visual language that pulls more from painting and drawing than traditional photography.

Each picture combines hundreds of individual photographs made across the United States. The collection of plants and trees in each image is improbable – a form of digitally assisted migration – signaling possibility, connection, and loss. Some collages are more connected to the real. In contrast, others are overtly fictional, redacting and distorting the photographic information through unnatural color and form. The most synthetic images in the exhibition provide a space to consider what it means to be natural or artificial in our current era, where the entirety of our world is affected by humans. Functioning as neither documentary nor absolute fiction, Merrill points to a complicated relationship with place - a combination of what exists and what is desired.

Garden of Artificial Sugar Exhibition Catalog | Interview