Tanya Merrill: Land animal, house animal continues at 303 Gallery through October 24.

Tanya Merrill’s work invents narratives that examine humanity’s fraught relationship with nature and cultural portrayals of gender and sexuality through her own contemporary lens. Land animal, house animal traces Merrill’s interest in Americana, interlaced with references to historical artworks and impressions of domesticity, motherhood and partnership.

Merrill explores her interest in ecology through direct observation at her studio site in the Hudson Valley. Plants, animals and insects enter her paintings as a cast of recurring characters. The same hawk outside the window every morning, the horse down the road, and the columbine flowers bending their heads in the shade are all familial, meeting in the exhibition alongside intimate portraits of the human figure.

Merrill uses graphite and oil paint thinned to mimic her experience of the fluidity and immediacy of painting with watercolors in a sketchbook en plein air.