Gerónimo Mercado
Bio: Gerónimo Mercado is a musician and sound artist born in Spain to Puerto Rican parents. He graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying music and film. He maintains a practice in film music and has had screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival and elsewhere.
At Columbia University, he has studied with professors Brad Garton and Miya Masaoka in the MFA Sound Arts Program.
His sculptures and installations are exhibited in New York, Japan, Chicago, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. His work focuses on the human interaction of the audience with his pieces, and within this context, he employs various media and technologies.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: In times of constant disruptive change and overstimulation, I feel that my practice as an artist pushes to unify my growing set of skills, allowing me to create subjects that appeal to the core of humanism and its many conditions.
I view interactivity as something tangible that involves the listener/viewer, and it is a key component to my installations. This may include visual elements such as video projection mapping, kinetic sculpture, and performance. Sound as a material figures heavily in my work, and the dictates of time are a major component. I create work and strive to construct a direct connection between audience and the art piece. For me, the audiences’ engagement and interaction with the work is a kind of malleable material.
I explore concepts of individuality and the social and the psychological space; I think about and mediate emotions and inquisitive- ness of the viewers, their connection to their own core feelings such as embarrassment, desire, curiosity, and confusion.
L to R: K@lostrum (Cow milk, paint, found acrylic domes, video projection, computer, sound, 2017); Lumarca by Matt Parker, (a new-media artist in New York, BAM, Teknopolis Install, 2017); Mirrors (Transducers, found acrylic domes, video projection, camera, computer, sound, 2016)