James Mercer draws as if perception itself were improvisational. His lines both describe and wander: uncertain, jittery, wormlike marks that drift across the page gathering associations and forming freaky maps. Buildings, bugs, quarters, almonds, storefronts, fragments of skyline and all appear within the same field of attention. Scale collapses into psychic weather.Mercer’s colored pencil works seem structured by urban meandering—bodega runs, sidewalk encounters, compulsive noticing. The point isn’t arrival. Like a grocery trip guided less by a recipe than by whichever produce looks best at the moment, the work follows appetite and distraction.
His grids and mapping systems never fully organize experience. Instead, they resemble the nervous aura of order constantly dissolving under the pressure of sensation. Lines loop and snag like leftover string beans or tangled cords. The drawings produce an aura of janky interconnectedness, as though the world were held together by coincidence, residue, and vibes. In Mercer’s work, improvisation becomes a mode of seeing that is open-ended, chemical, and alert to the strange democracy of urban detail.
