Shyanna Merced: View The Developing Girl How You View The Sun Rising

February 16 – March 15, 2024
BICA School Project Space

Determined to use an interdisciplinary approach to save souls, Shyanna Merced paints to eliminate the fine line between love and everything else disguised as love. She is interested in exploring the daily shortcomings of man, and understanding what those shortcomings do to the masses. What that does to hearts. Merced uses her practice as she uses her lungs to breathe. It is vital.

View The Developing Girl How You View The Sun Rising is an exhibition of paintings that dissect the artists’ transition from girlhood to womanhood and the grace needed to survive the boundless metamorphosis. Nine paintings narrate the evolution, building over time, fighting against each other, and finding harmony.

About the Artist

Shyanna Merced is an artist currently based on Earth. Merced grew up Puerto Rican in Buffalo, New York. In her mission to save souls, Merced is primarily a visual artist but moves between mediums – from painting to literature, performance, textiles, and more. Besides The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Merced also has an upcoming exhibition at Agatha Falls. She holds a studio in downtown Buffalo.

Physically, I am born from the womb of a woman. Soulfully, I am born from the highest. 

I am exhaustingly, fascinated with trauma, specifically mine. 

The Cause and Effect relationship between what’s been done, and what am I going to do about it. 

The hyper-awareness of what you don’t have physically pushes you to understand what you have soulfully. 

The space in between the two exercises my imagination so I can convey what is needed.

In the way I work, I am creating a space for viewers to feel conviction, through the eyes of their life experiences. From the point of the womb to today. 

We are simultaneously in a beginning and in an end. 

Explore your fleshly wounds, not to understand your place in the world, but to understand your position in the spirit. 

My medium is soul, and I am nothing but a vessel to deliver truth to whomever perceives. 

For I am referencing them.

— Shyanna Merced