Shimmer Afield: LASER Panel at St. John's College

Panel Presenters: Chad Colby, Jess Merritt, Deidre Greenly, and Nico Rasmussen

This closing panel for Shimmer features artists from ourside the Santa Fe area, as far afiend as Colorado. This event will be followed by an artist's potluck.

Jess Merritt is a New Mexico multidisciplinary artist based in Albuquerque who focuses on mapping the narrative of how identity is influenced by landscape, particularly the landscapes of her home state, while also exploring the “Querencia” of those landscapes and stewardship of them. She uses analog photographic processes, painting, and paper sculpture to explore the relationship between herself and the land. With her “Atmospheric Cells” installation she is exploring the scientific phenomenon of cloud cells and the disruption of normal weather patterns due to climate change.

Chad Colby is an educator and artist residing in Durango, CO. Since 2002, he has served as Professor of Art & Design at Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts college and a Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution (NASNTI). At FLC, he has been invested in promoting undergraduate research opportunities for students in Arts and Humanities disciplines. Chad’s artistic practice vacillates from mixed-media works on paper to oil paintings to site-specific installations. Much of the subject matter revolves around issues of land use and geological history, and the systems of visual interpretation we use to convey the chaotic and invisible.

Deidre Greenly’s art practice examines concepts of destruction and renewal through sculpting rocks from the future. The combination of her B.F.A. in Fine Arts and B.S. in Electrical Engineering complement her artistic interests exercising her creative and critical thinking skills. Her work offers a glimpse into a future epoch beyond the Anthropocene by drawing on the relationship between stratigraphy and human impact. She is a cultural blend born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico which she cherishes as her original home and frequents to spend time with family. She embraced Colorado Springs for her career where she currently resides and works in her art studio using objects destined for landfills which assist in maintaining a sustainable practice.

Artist and St. John's student Nico Rasmussen has the special privilege to live beside a library. Studies feed and fuel art, and art gives the studies purpose. This exchange exists not only with the poetry and literature, but also with math, philosophy, and science. Social, artistic, and academic lives are thereby regions without dividing walls.

Project Venue and Setting
At St. John’s College, science and art are complementary ways of knowing, and all students engage with the great works of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, poetry, music, and literature through close reading and sustained conversation. With a curriculum that moves from Euclid, Darwin and Einstein to the study and illustration of plants and the movement of celestial beings, St. John’s fosters an education rooted in inquiry, imagination, and the enduring dialogue between scientific discovery and artistic expression.

SciArt Santa Fe, founded in 2019, fosters artists across disciplines that reflect the cultural diversity of New Mexico, supports research that addresses issues that disproportionately affect people of under-represented races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexual orientations, national origins, citizenship statuses and ages including climate change, species extinction and migration, that often do not fit within a traditional gallery framework.

Our Spring 2026 SciArt Santa Fe exhibition features 20 New Mexico - affiliated artists: Sophie Azzolina, Morgan Barnard, Bobbe Besold, Paul Biagi, Chad Colby, Shirley Crow, Deidre Greenly , Jeanette Hart-Mann , Evgenya Kirichenko, Jessica Lanham, Susan Latham, Richard Lowenberg, Palma Maya-Johnson, Jess Merritt, Heather Murphree, Andrea Polli, Nico Rasmussen, Alyce Santoro, Abigail Sapien and Lila Steffan

This event is free and accessible to all. If you need more information, contact [email protected] with questions related to access and accommodation.

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