Embracing Entropy (Performance/Video)
Size: Variable
Quintuple Cloth, Crochet, Felted, Wool, steel wool, rust, speaker wire, speakers, 13 Minute Audio/Performance. Original sound score composed of recorded bodily sounds.
Performers: Ryn Duong, Julia Vessey, Taylor Hanigosky, Katherine Mills-Yatsko
2024

R. Mertens is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses fiber, sculpture, sound, installation, photography, and digital technologies. His work investigates material transformation and the ways physical objects can carry traces of memory, experience, and time.
Mertens’ longstanding engagement with textiles, including weaving, felting, quilting, and embroidery, provides a foundation for a practice that bridges traditional craft and contemporary art. He frequently combines labor-intensive hand processes with digital fabrication, found materials, mechanical elements, photography, and sound.

Drawing from anthropology, mythology, science, spirituality, and observations of the natural and human-made world, Mertens is particularly interested in impermanence. His materials may be stretched, accumulated, fractured, corroded, repeated, or allowed to decay. These processes become metaphors for the body and for the continual cycles of growth, loss, memory, and renewal.

Mertens earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Bellevue Arts Museum, Muskegon Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, and Hangaram Museum of Design in Seoul. His honors include a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and recognition in the Trawick Prize.

Based in Virginia, Mertens continues to develop a materially diverse practice centered on the tension between permanence and change.