Merion Estes: Monsters, Mutants, and Ghosts
May 10 - June 21, 2025
Opening Reception: May 10, 4-6pm
Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present Monsters, Mutants, and Ghosts, our first solo exhibition with California artist Merion Estes. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery from May 10 to June 21, with an opening reception on May 10 from 4-6pm.
Merion Estes is an ecofeminist and pioneer in the Pattern & Decoration movement who became active in the Feminist Art Movement in the late 1960s and ‘70s with the opening of Womanspace and the Woman’s Building. One of her consistent avenues of artistic exploration is the fusion of beauty and horror, and she juxtaposes diverse materials and images to create prescient landscapes exploring environmental vulnerability, instability, and loss. In her newest paintings, Monsters, Mutants, and Ghosts, Estes explores our present environmental perils: pollution and degradation. She creates complex collages of printed fabrics—often hunter’s camouflage. She then adds expressive drips, splatters, and lines of paint, as well as materials like fabric cutouts and photo transfers. These maelstroms of pattern and color are at times lovely and unsettling: clouds of grey and green are dreamlike or poisonous; birds sing, but behind bars. Chimerical figures emerge from the matrix of each canvas, like memories or specters.
As Annie Dillard wrote of watching a total solar eclipse, witnessing the sublime can be transportive—and transformative. “If you ride these monsters deeper down,” she began, “if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil.” Estes descends to this primordial place, confronting the tenuous boundary between beauty and destruction, and maintaining the hope that, facing evident ruination, we will come to our senses.
Raised in Southern California, Merion Estes was an influential member of the Pattern & Decoration movement, opening the visual arts to designs and colors then thought too frivolous—and feminine—to be valuable. She continued to develop her innovative pattern work alongside significant L.A.-based artists including Judy Chicago, Faith Wildling, Judith Simonian, and Nancy Youdelman in the 1970s. Estes earned her BFA from the University of New Mexico Albuquerque in 1970 and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1972. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2022. Her works are in the collections of the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.