DARCY MERANTE  ARTIST STATEMENT

Waves of multifarious faces and bodies weaving and bobbing past one another during their daily ritual on metropolitan streets, disparate individuals gathering for one unified purpose and the surprising homogeneity of all human behavior are my sources of inspiration.

I seek to translate the anonymity of bodies when they gather en masse. Various media sources are scoured to find reference images that display a rhythmic flow of figures in compressed and ambiguous spaces. Though the images are selected based on their relevance to current social situations, the context is stripped from the images, as are all definable individual characteristics. Source images remain merely as a point of departure for further objectification and manipulation.

Mark-making is figurative in its suggestiveness and the anthropomorphic shapes I create express the essence of a crowd without describing it. I am intrigued by the relationships between figures and the arbitrary patterning that is revealed in the densely abstracted confrontational space.