McDonald and Merckle, Collaborative Drawing
DOWN A HOLE DARKLY
Jillian McDonald & Heather Merckle
Dec 12, 2025 – Jan 18, 2026
Exhibition Opening, December 12, 6 – 8PM
A conversation with the artists on the eve of the darkest day of the year,
December 20, 4 – 6PM
Exhibition walk-through and workshop, January 10, 4 – 6PM
150 1st Avenue, entrance on 9th Street
New York, NY
Gallery Hours, Friday – Sunday, 1 – 6PM
PS122 Gallery is pleased to present Down a Hole Darkly, a two-person exhibition teeming with tunnels, passageways, and portals as both physical structures and symbolic thresholds.
Featuring video, drawing, painting, and sculpture by New York artists Jillian McDonald and Heather Merckle, the exhibition spans two adjoining galleries, a connecting corridor, and an architectural column. Together, the artworks position the tunnel as a site of suspension and transformation where time stretches, boundaries blur, and wonders lie beyond our reach.
In the bright east gallery, two large-scale graphite sinkhole drawings – one by each artist – greet the visitor. These works establish a dialogue between the artists’ distinct yet complementary practices. Rising from the floor, Merckle’s sculptural pseudocrater Geomorph of the Inner World invites a gaze into its hollowed chamber. Peering over its rim and into its depth, a hidden realm unfolds, where imagination and reflection converge. A salon-style assemblage of images by both artists stretches across one wall as a connective tissue of ideas from deep underground to outer space – holes leading toward the celestial, tangled tunnel forms, and scientific cross sections of geology and deep time. These works map unseen routes of inquiry, linking the artists’ studios and archives. Around the gallery’s central column, McDonald’s hairy, animal-like clay sculptures are arranged in a looped procession on the floor – a tunnel with legs that leads nowhere.
In the darkened west gallery, McDonald’s video Tunnel and Radio Skies presents an apocalyptic narrative: a woman digs a hole like a portal in her urban backyard and sets off on a journey through unseen passages while visual electromagnetic waves animate the landscapes. Video juxtaposes live footage with images created through the use of artificial intelligence text-to-image generators. Nearby, a sixteen-foot drawing extends across the gallery in the form of a glow-in-the-dark “exquisite corpse.” Passed back and forth between the artists as they tunneled through, built upon, and created a passage, the paper is marked by continual discovery, where each exchange revealed something previously unknown, unearthed only through collaboration.
Down a Hole Darkly is an alluring exhibition that is a journey between descent and emergence, darkness and illumination.
ARTISTS
Jillian McDonald lives in Brooklyn and Troy, New York and is a professor at Pace University. Her works feature holes and tunnels in ecologically fragile landscapes. Videos are speculative fictions with partially unreal settings, while drawings and sculptures of roots, portals, and serpentine forms are traps and escapes. Exhibitions were held recently at Harvestworks, Spectral Lines, and Undercurrent in New York; AxeNéo7 in Québec; aCinema in Milwaukee; Philip J. Steele Gallery in Denver; and The Esker Foundation in Calgary. Exhibitions were reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art, and critical discussion appears in The Transatlantic Zombie by Sarah Lauro and Deconstructing Brad Pitt, edited by Christopher Schaberg. McDonald was awarded a video fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts, media arts grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, and residencies including Wave Farm and Harvestworks (New York), The Arctic Circle Artist & Scientist Residency (Svalbard), Lilith Performance Studio (Sweden), Sporobole for Art and Technology (Québec), and Glenfiddich (Scotland). Video distributor is VTape in Canada.
www.jillianmcdonald.net
@jillianmmcdonald
Heather Merckle is currently based in Queens, New York. Her drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures become portals into layered worlds, revealing what lies beneath and beyond. Sinkholes, pseudocraters, and hidden layers of the earth suggest that the ground beneath us is porous, an archive of stories, rituals, and mythologies waiting to be uncovered. Merckle earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her most recent project, Fallen Star, a large-scale outdoor sculpture, was presented during Upstate Art Weekend with Field Projects and Mother in Law’s Gallery in Germantown, NY. Over the past fifteen years, her work has appeared in publications such as ArtMaze Magazine (Anniversary Issue 20), New American Paintings (Issues 77 and 83), Studio Visit Magazine, and MAAKE Magazine (Issue 6). She has participated in residencies in Berlin, Iceland, and Italy, as well as across the U.S., including Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, CA), Outpost (Queens, NY), The Saltonstall Foundation (Ithaca, NY), StudioWorks at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art (Eastport, ME), and Teton Artlab (Jackson, WY).
@hmerckle
Show Brochure
