Anna Von Mertens: Nature And Other Relationships

Anna Von Mertens has taken text conversations with her daughter and erased the words, leaving only the overload of emojis that little kids love to send when they are new to the medium. Known for her aura portraits (think northern lights for energy people) and work in fabric, here Von Mertens replaces the screen slickness of emojis with the unique marks of the colored pencil artist. As she put it, “Emojis are cartoonish stand-ins for feeling, fired off with a flash of the thumbs. Drawings are intimate, personal, pulling you in. My emoji drawings interrupt this polarity.”