City Blocks 

Noel Mercado 
2024
Edition of 3
MDF Board, paint, with artist-stamped canvas label.
7.5” D x 7” W x 15.5” H

 

Noel Mercado 
2024
Edition of 3
MDF Board, paint, with artist-stamped canvas label.
7.5” D x 7” W x 15.5” H 

Noel Mercado
2024
Edition of 3
MDF Board, paint, with artist-stamped canvas label.
7.5” D x 7” W x 15.5” H

About the Artist 

Noel Mercado is a Chicago-based artist who works across media. He explores the essence, lifecycle, and cultural meaning of found objects, often repurposing them to generate new forms and configurations. 

Print and Object is honored to release this limited edition series of sculpture works in connection to the exhibition Crafting Pragmatics, curated by Anna Cerniglia, at ENGAGE Projects from January 13 - February 10, 2024. City Blocks is inspired by structure, modularity, and the buildings around us. Mercado’s process revolves around mixing hard and soft materials, the Crafting Pragmatics canvases accompanied by City Blocks display a complementary combination of color and contrast in the medium.

Crafting Pragmatics featurs the work of Angela Finney, Noel Mercado and Hope Wang, this group exhibition expands discourse around utilitarian practices, technology, material culture, and the history of craft with modern outlooks.
 
Crafting Pragmatics is a space where binaries, such as craft and fine art or functional and decorative, blend and bend into overlapping conversations, innovations, and experimentation. For her Perspectival series, Angela Finney engages with the histories of art, design, and craft to imbue her works with multiple perspectives. Inviting found objects into her work, legacies of material culture vibrate against geometric painted patterns and forms, charging the visual space with an elastic sense of time and context. Steeped in the history of weaving and textile work, Chicago-based artist Hope Wang, fuzes traditional technique with digital technology that provokes a layering of contradictions. Calling forth fleeting moments of the human condition, her compositions are imprints of our ephemeral passings and the impact our gestures can bring forth. Noel Mercado mines iconographies, histories, and spiritualities to re-orient context and awaken contemplation. Anchored in the history of furniture making and embroidery, Mercado interweaves a layered archive of collected moments that become a visual meandering through his inner world and cultural touch points.