AGE: 33
BASED IN: New York
For Jeffrey Meris, anything can be sculpture. The multidisciplinary artist’s materials of choice are everyday objects aggregated en masse—say, a bucket’s worth of Coca-Cola or a pile of shoes belonging to migrants. He considers the medium “a place of infinite possibility ... rather than a constant, fixed place in the world.”
Meris, born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, first developed his artistic capacities as a costume maker for Junkanoo, an annual festival of masquerade, drumming, and dance celebrated throughout the Bahamas since the 17th century. As a child, he met the esteemed Bahamian painter and architect Jackson Burnside through Junkanoo circles, and later encountered conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, who famously shipped a four-and-a-half-ton ice block to Nassau. Meris soon made his way into the world of contemporary art, and then to America and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, from which he graduated in 2015 before completing an MFA at Columbia.
By 2022, he was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a part of that year’s cohort, Meris made To the Rising Sun, a 12-foot, round burst of crutches affixed to a double-sided geodesic dome. He found himself thinking of “a solar body, but also about a microbial virus.” It’s one of a number of works that illustrates his fascination with repetition at every scale. Many of Meris’s steel works are both intricate and majestic, a sensibility he learned from the spectacular pageants of Junkanoo. These include “Catch a Stick of Fire,” started in 2021, a series of arboresque metal chandeliers bearing live flowers; and Mouth to Mouth, 2019, a canopy of jugs and tubes placed on lounge chair frames.
Today, Meris’s practice is focused on healing. For his newest project, which opened at Prospect New Orleans in early November, he worked with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Civil Aviation Authority of the Bahamas for over a year to create Our Moon Shines, For All the World to See, two monumental beacons of light that will flash Morse code in New Orleans and Nassau. The exchange, taken from a Christian song Meris sang daily in school and serving as something of a mantra for the artist, reads, “I am a promise / I am a possibility.”
