Artist Profile

Merrill Steiger

Artist Profile

Merrill Steiger

Having been a colorist for a great many years, Steiger decided when beginning her recent series, Sci-Fi, to investigate tonality and design by eliminating color. Sci-Fi demonstrates her continued interest in the use of dotting as a meditative painting technique in conjunction with other textures and patterns to evoke movement and force, thus tapping into the flow of cosmic energy.
Steiger’s paintings reflect the collage composition, which she uses first and foremost before the painting process begins.  Having had avid interest in science fiction through movies and books, she decided to explore this world through her own imaginary landscapes. In the collage studies, Steiger combines cosmic imagery with black and white photographs that focus on strong contrasts between light and shadow. The sci-fi imagery relates to images of space as seen on TV, harking back to man’s first grainy and monochromatic view of outer space from the surface of the moon. The other images of black and white photography show intense patterns of light and shadow in architectural and natural settings. The resulting paintings fuse together the pioneer investigations of outer space and early photography. This re-contextualization of historical imagery in these newly imagined vistas creates a compelling suspension of time and place. Furthermore, Steiger’s uses a monochromatic palette in an attempt to generate the foreboding and mysterious aura of subliminal sci-fi scapes.
As in her previous series, Steiger continually hopes to encourage a universal, cross-cultural understanding of how we all strive to understand our existence through the paintings and collages in the Sci-Fi series. The work expresses the ever-evolving interconnectedness of the universe and the progression of human consciousness.

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