Becky Mutrux

Around the time I decided to go to one show or talk each week over the summer, I came up with the brilliant idea of using this as the basis of rebooting my blogging practice. This was supposed to be the third post, about a show I saw back in June. It’s now the first full week in August. I remember it being a lot easier to blog while I was traveling…I wonder why… Anyways, this show was at the SooVAC, and featured CC Mercer Watson. I didn’t know anything about it really, but SooVAC always has really fantastic shows, so I wanted to be sure I saw it before it went down.

There were actually two different shows going on, but Mercer Watson’s captivated me the moment I saw it – you’ll see why in a moment. It took me a bit longer to understand the conceptual connection it has to my own practice, but when I did, it hit hard. So each year, SooVAC has a juried exhibition called Untitled. CC Mercer Watson was one of the artists that took part in Untitled 18 (the 2024 show), and the trip to deliver her work from Arkansas to Minnesota was part of her inspiration for The Road Less Traveled: An Ode to the Green Book. The Green Book was a travel guide by Victor Hugo Green, which highlighted safe places for African-American travelers during journeys, a history she connected to through her own trek. At the time I was reading The Tourist, by Dean McCannell, and after reading his analysis of tourism and travel guides, Mercer Watson’s work resonated with me even more.

This was the first piece you saw when you entered the gallery, and you may get an impression of why I was so taken with her work. The way that she works with printed fabrics to create her – paintings? quilts??? – is much like what I have done with some of my collages, but on a much grander scale. She uses texture and pattern to create space in ways that I’m only beginning to think about.

The work is full of small details as well as being vibrantly active. I love the connections between the fabrics she used and the way that she used them. The fingers in this detail just felt alive to me.

Each work was also accompanied by one of her poems. In them, she expresses her own experiences through references to history and pop culture. It was an interesting and clever approach to didactic. I feel like my blogging is a little heavy-handed (or my art is too straightforward) for me to be able to use this approach myself (yet), but since I literally just had a studio visit that asked me how I approach didactics, they are on my mind, and I admire the way that Mercer Watson has seamlessly integrated her poems into the experience of her work, and how they elucidate her experience for me.