About
BIOGRAPHY
Merlin Coleman is a multimedia artist making performance, recordings, large and small scale projects and productions ranging from a Gargling Chorus to a layered work about a local quarry’s environmental degradation. Coleman holds an MFA in Composition from California Institute of the Arts.
Coleman has presented her work in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Kyoto and Tokyo at venues such as Collective Unconscious, de Young Museum, Dance Mission, The Lab, Mills College, SoMarts, 21 Grand, and Venue 9. She has collaborated with artists, choreographers musicians and actors Dina Emerson, Dan Cantrell, Bob Ernst, Thollen McDonas, Mary Armentrout, Nils Frykdahl, Dawn McCarthy, Liz Harvey and Megan Nicely .
She has been awarded artist residencies at Chalk Hill, Engine 27, Millet Farm and Ragdale, and has produced two full length recordings and is on multiple compilations. Coleman founded the Tower Residency, an artist residency on her rural property, and Milk Bar, an artist-curated salon series as an environment for the intersection of innovative, contemporary and experimental artistic genres.
Her new work Explorations of Extraction and Decay will premiere at The Audium in San Francisco in 2023.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multimedia artist making performances, recordings, large and small scale site specific projects and productions. I have been deeply influenced by performance art since my Dad snuck me into a Laurie Anderson show when I was ten. I intermingle field recordings, music composition, sound poetry, performance art, movement, film, text, theater, props and participation. Melting pianos, unraveled stories, harmony-filled songs, animal and environmental sounds, made up languages, vocal experimentation and absurdism are through lines layered in my work.
My instinctual impulse is to address environmental and social consciousness and health. Some themes include environmental degradation, refurbishing fairytales to unpack western cultural icons and narratives, and utilizing participation to create bold communal experiments and shared experience.
I have had an ongoing love affair with multichannel sound systems and the spaces they inhabit and often think of my work in spacial terms. At the core, lives the creation of dramatic and emotional worlds where an audience member can feel they are living, for a short time directly inside of the worlds created.
recent articles
“Finders Retreaters.” Sensi California Magazine. Spring 2022
“Will Sonoma County Ease Restrictions on Urban Agriculture?” Made Local Magazine. March/April 2022.
instagram: @merlincolemann
