Christopher Meerdo: Bundle Umbra

DOCUMENT is pleased to present Bundle Umbra, Christopher Meerdo’s third exhibition at the gallery. Drawing from hacker and whistleblower file caches sourced on the dark web, the exhibition considers what is seen and remains invisible within international information systems.

Routed through 3D displacement mapping, segments of the archives take the form of thermoformed and perforated plastic collage works. Each function as a light emission panel through the artist’s use of custom electronics and electroluminescent paint.  

The work draws from secondary and idiosyncratic symbols, handwritten notes, tables, and graphics located within the archives. The source material emerges from various activities from the past 30 years. This includes documents from Chinese secret prisons, Fraternal Order of Police confidential contracts, papers seized from the US embassy takeover in Tehran in the late 1970’s, and recently revealed banking disclosures from the Cayman Islands, among others.  
 

Christopher Meerdo is an artist who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent his teenage years in Šiauliai, Lithuania. He resided in Chicago for the last 15 years before relocating in 2019 to the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Meerdo received his MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2012-2019, and was recently appointed tenure track Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas. 

Recent exhibitions include Exgirlfriend (Berlin); The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago); Wilfried Lentz (Rotterdam), The National Gallery of Kosovo (Pristina), and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburg). He was an artist in residence at the SIM Program in Reykjavik and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Meerdo was most recently a fellow the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands for the 2018-2019 program.