Hilary Merzbacher A Personal Statement

In the beginning of my junior year at RISD, I moved off campus to an apartment near Wickenden St., not far from highway I-195 and began painting my surroundings. In the thick of a major highway re-routing project, the neighborhood landscape was largely that of mammoth piles of earth, heavy machinery, and mile-high radio antenna. By painting these features of the landscape, I became fascinated by the tension between the grand scale of the objects and their strange impermanence in the context of the construction project. The same massive concrete forms reoccurred throughout the landscape, being built in some locations and simultaneously leveled in others. Neither permanent nor unique, these forms lack geographical specificity—they present themselves not as landmarks, but instead, interchangeable icons that characterize our contemporary landscape.

What once started as a site-specific exploration of my environment in Providence has evolved to encompass the ubiquitous and monumental imagery of the built world. By configuring and reconfiguring the imagery through varying degrees of abstraction, I’m interested in exploring the tension between specificity of place and the overwhelming continuity of our roadside world.

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