Claire Merkle

Artist Statement: Through compositional disruption, I construct painted scenes where order and instability coexist. These tensions mirror how shared worlds are structured: through overlapping, often conflicting frameworks that determine how we see and inhabit space. My paintings ask to be navigated though they depict fragmented visual systems and shifting hierarchies of meaning. In this way, the paintings become sites of encounter rather than resolution. Ultimately, my work suggests that a shared world is not fixed, but continuously explored and continuously being made, formed by the friction between structures that bind us together and the forces that keep us apart.

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