Rachel Merrill was an athlete, once. Her toe-touch-reach won her an achievement award and a certified document from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness in 1992. After winning this high achievement, she’s continued with a competitive edge. Exploring themes of spectacle, American sport, and ideas of competition, Rachel Merrill’s interdisciplinary approach integrates textiles, sculpture, and performance into HIIT-like video projections and installations.
Merrill received her BA from Northwestern University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and earned her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hill, Michigan. She serves as Professor and Chair of Art and Design at Grand View University. She has received the Excellence and Innovation in Teaching (2018) and Excellence in Scholarship Awards (2022). She is the recipient of the prestigious Iowa Fellowship Grant (2019) and Catalyst Grant (2023) made possible by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment of the Arts. It’s Always A Competition series won several awards in selected group exhibitions, continuing her reach.
These moments and memories of grand stupidity focus on embarrassing, awkward and painful parts of high performance spectacle in both grand and mundane senses. Deliberately manufacturing garish, tawdry costumes and props, these spectacles compile personas that are humorously absurd, ridiculously repetitive, and contradictions of the manufactured self. The repetitive and monotonous work (laboring over the costumes and props, performing pseudo-scripted choreography, and manipulating manufactured video) is a calculated part of momentary grandeur.