Sculpture and installation that address racism and rebirth.

Installation view of Jeffrey Meris: be ever wonderful, 2022. Matthew Brown, Los Angeles. © Jeffrey Meris. Photo by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Brown.

With his first solo exhibition at Matthew Brown gallery in Los Angeles currently on view, Jeffrey Meris is on the rise. His work involves an examination of American racism through embodied materiality. Meris counts among his inspirations two pillars of Black literary depictions of manhood and queerness: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. From his works using steel in the Now You See Me; Now You Don’t series (2020) to his shift to aluminum with the ebullient Catch a Stick of Fire I (2021), memoir feels useful but not central to his process. Rather, it is the story of Meris’s process alongside his experience of it that proves simultaneously resonant.

Erica N. Cardwell Could we begin with the Now You See Me; Now You Don’t series?

Jeffrey Meris Yes. This body of work is comprised of seven kinetic sculptures where my body is mounted on a perforated sheet-metal structure that I welded together. The entire sculpture is mechanized by a motor, and there is a cast of my body on each grate that moves, either on a horizontal or vertical plane. The idea is that the cast is made out of plaster, and the friction that’s being created between the grate and the plaster surface results in a slow shedding of the sculpture so the sculpture is slowly deteriorating, more or less. This work is fundamental to the way my practice is situated right now because so much of the work that I made or am interested in is in conversation or grew out of this body of work.

I made this work just as I was coming out of grad school. I had a very unfortunate event when I was taking the subway headed downtown from Harlem’s 125th Street. I was about to swipe my card at the turnstile, and the machine asked me to swipe again. After spending the five or seven bucks that I had on my MetroCard and me knowing that I paid, I jumped the turnstile, and that ended up becoming a very strange and unfortunate incident of racial profiling by the MTA police. I got a ticket, and on the ticket my height was recorded as six-foot-seven and my weight as 250 pounds. I’ve never been either of those things. I weigh 180 pounds, and I’m six-foot-two. I ended up in the transit court that has been set up for incidences like this. It was in that court where I had the realization that everyone fighting these cases were Black and Brown folks. For me it felt like the misrepresentation of the New York City that I know. The work encompasses all these ideas, especially how Black people are imagined in the cultural phenomenon. When I was making Now You See Me; Now You Don’t, I was really thinking about how to disrupt these systems, quite literally and conceptually, specifically the sculpture The Block is Hot.

Jeffrey Meris, The Block is Hot, 2020, plaster body cast, AC motor, steel, concrete blocks, aircraft cable, U link, pulleys, ratchet strap, 96 × 66 × 32 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

EC Yes, please tell me about The Block is Hot.

JM I try to reference pop culture every now and then in the work, and that is a reference to Lil Wayne’s 1999 studio album. The sculpture of the chest is a cast being leveraged by a cinderblock. I grew up in the Caribbean, and homes made of cinder blocks are seen as more precious and more valuable because they can withstand weather, but it’s also this thing of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

EC I want to talk about another image from the Now You See Me; Now You Don’t series. You showed me this work when we met in your studio in early 2021.

JM As someone who grew up in a predominantly Black country, race is such an American conundrum. Even though it affects everyone everywhere in the world, I think there’s something particular about being Black in America that I really had to come to terms with when I moved here. I think of the casts as surrogates for racialized violence. The way that Black bodies are interpolated in space doesn’t give them the humanity or the dignity that we are entitled to. We look at Black bodies not as singular human bodies but as these collective hieroglyphs. With these pieces, I was thinking about “hands up” and the way that has become culturally coded to mean something specific.

At the time that I was making these sculptures, I also had an insane fascination with Invisible Man. There is a specific scene in the book when the unnamed protagonist goes to get a job at Liberty White paints and meets Mr. Kimbro who has been programmed to believe the slogan that whiteness is purity, which speaks to a history of racism. I think a broad statement about my work is that there is a metabolism to my studio practice; it’s almost as if I’m writing an essay, and each body of work functions as a chapter, so things often segue and relate to one another.

Jeffrey Meris, Catch A Stick of Fire II, 2021, aluminum, hardware, ceramics, coral bell plants, water, light, oxygen, care, 180 × 120 × 120 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

EC Indeed. That body of work is a fascinating autobiographical context. That’s a nice pivot to Catch a Stick of Fire.

JM Yeah, I love that work.

EC It’s quite beautiful. The plant life has me thinking of Antoine’s Organ (2016) by Rashid Johnson.

JM During the pandemic I started becoming very intentional about the ways in which I was caring for my mental and physical space. I started this ritual of Self-Care Saturday during which I tried to unplug from the world and just be with and take care of myself and present a narrative that was counter to the one we understand about Black men. A lot of times Self-Care Saturday looked like cooking, reading, lounging, and not putting myself in this sort of headfirst work mode.

I started taking care of all these plants, and my apartment was a forest for much of 2020, even into 2021. One of the plants I fell in love with was the spider plant. After doing research, I realized that you can just take them off and place them in a little bit of water, and they’ll sprout into a plant that will eventually mature and become an adult. Eventually, I realized that the work I was doing outside of studio life was not so separate from what I was doing in my studio. These two things started to converge, and eventually the work that I started making revolved around a language or practices of care. I migrated the plants away from my house and into my studio around July 2020. At the same time, it felt like the country was on fire after the uprising and because there were so many fireworks. There were all these suspicions and conspiracies about sonic warfare. There might be some truth to that.

JM While living in New Haven, Connecticut, I would find empty bullet shells, and I started collecting them. These three ideas—plants, bullet shells, and fireworks—stayed with me for some time. I thought about how I might use this language of care to galvanize all of these ideas? For the first iteration of Catch a Stick of Fire, the architecture of the sculpture mimics the architecture of the spider plant and a firework explosion right at the center. The ceramic pots mimic the shape of bullets to symbolize the violence being regenerated as a place of growth. Even though it has a spiraling implication, life is coming from it. Eventually the sculpture shifted into less of a flow work, and it became a chandelier. I was thinking about the material qualities of light. It has different iterations. In the Sanctuary exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park, it is a stand-alone sculpture. This really produced a whole other life for it because the original motif was its creation of light, but then by having it be outdoors basking in the light was a wonderful evolution for this piece.

Jeffrey Meris, Shirt vs Skin I, 2021, iron rust and acetic acid on terry rags, stainless steel snaps, poplar, aluminum, 48 × 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

EC Catch a Stick of Fire is also in your show at Matthew Brown?

JM Yes, I am making three new iterations of Catch a Stick of Fire. I want to continue the material exploration for the newer works. I also plan to reimagine a few of the kinetic sculptures. Similar to my Shirt vs Skin series (2021), I am exposing copper to ammonia to intentionally make abstracted blue color field paintings and layering this with UV-printed imagery onto t-shirts that I procured from the straw market in Nassau, Bahamas.

Jeffrey Meris: be ever wonderful is on view at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles until June 30.

Erica N. Cardwell is a writer and critic currently based between Brooklyn and Toronto. In 2021, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her first book, Wrong is Not My Name.

Textiles and video art that bring materials and cultures together.

Hearing with ears and bodies.

Sculpture that investigates contradictory symbolism.

Like many writers, I feel centered when I write, or it might be better to say, when I don’t write, when I can’t write for whatever reason, I feel, frankly, de-stabilized. It’s dangerous for me not to write.

BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

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