Jessica Marie Mercy | sacred space

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 14 mar 2020

It wasn’t until graduate school that I was introduced to the concept of public spaces as they relate social groups. It’s something that once you learn about it, you realise you’ve known it all along, you just didn’t have the words for it. Imagine your local gym. There is probably a long row of cardio machines of different varieties: treadmills, rowing machines, and ellipticals. Close to the cardio are often the weight machines, those strange ergonomic structures that allow people to hone in on one particular muscle group before moving down the line to the next one. Finally, usually in a space somewhat separated, there will be a free weights room. Squat racks and rows and rows of dumbbells in increasing sizes line the walls and shiny benches fill the middle. Who are you imagining in this space? I’m going to guess you’ve placed large, straight men here. This is what we mean when we label spaces: male space, female space, black space, white space, straight space, queer space. While the rest of the gym is filled with most everyone, the weight room is where men are. Speaking as a woman who has spent a fair bit of time in weight rooms, in many different gyms, I can tell you that the discomfort of crossing that threshold for the first time is palpable. Despite knowing my way around a bench with the best of them, particularly when entering a new gym, I feel like an interloper. This is what we mean when we talk about space.

Yet for marginalised populations having spaces specific to one’s identity is incredibly important. It is argued that most all public spaces in the United States are straight, white space. This includes shopping centres, grocery stores, schools, and medical buildings. If you are an individual who doesn’t tick both of those identity boxes, that feeling of interloping can follow you throughout your day-to-day life, so it is easy to imagine how important it is to have spaces of refuge. 

Jessica Marie Mercy is a printmaker, visual artist and self identified “femme, queer bitch” from Seattle, Washington, whose artistic practice revolves around preserving and celebrating queer spaces and queer community. Mercy grew up in a small, conservative town east of the Cascade Mountain Range from Seattle. When most people think of Washington State they might imagine old growth forests, 300 days of rainfall, lakes, islands, deeply progressive politics, and booming and expensive tech culture, but this only makes up about one third of the state geographically. Heading inland and over mountains, things get flat, dry, rural, and conservative. Weed dispensaries are replaced by pro-life pregnancy clinics, and boutique farm-to-table restaurants by, well, just farms. Mercy’s upbringing was inline culturally with all of this. Her memories of childhood include a lot of time in her room playing video games or Dungeons & Dragons without really any sense of her queerness. Queerness wasn’t anywhere around her so she didn’t get an opportunity to see an identity that looked like her own reflected back. That is until she received access to an unlocked Blockbuster rental card. Suddenly the world of 1990s queer films opened up. “But I’m a Cheerleader”, “Girl Play”, and “Better than Chocolate” became a regular video rental rotation and Mercy began to see images in the media that spoke to what wanted to do and who she was discovering herself to be. Then after the internet came to town, it was all over.

So in the tradition of countless young, queer Eastern Washington people, Mercy made her way to Seattle. It is a short two hour drive down I-90, but a world away culturally. While there, she started taking classes at North Seattle Community College. Mercy knew she wanted to be an artist, she had this drive to make and communicate. She had been preforming drag and go-go dancing in queer clubs throughout the city for years by this point, but she didn’t know what her visual practice was going to look like. She had the good fortune of landing in Amanda Knowles drawing class, and at first hated every minute of it. Mercy felt like she was the worst student in there, but after Knowles shared with her a story in which Knowles herself spent a night crying in front of a staircase that she had been tasked with drawing while in college, Mercy realised that just because she was struggling in this moment didn’t mean that an artistic career was out of  reach. Knowles was, and is, an accomplished printmaker, and after Mercy found this out, she knew she wanted to try her hand at the medium as well.

The first print Mercy ever created was a loving tribute to one of her favourite drag queen’s lips. This was the beginning of a love affair with making work about queer culture and femmes. “It was just the most beautiful thing to me,” she remembers. But things changed with the news of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. On December 2, 2016 just before midnight, a fire broke out in the former warehouse turned queer living and creative spaces. Thirty-six people died and a gathering space and cultural hub of queer cultural was lost. This was a wake up call for Mercy and the turning point where her printmaking practice expanded to include the documentation, celebration, and preservation of queer spaces. She does so with beautifully rendered relief works and photo-based screen prints all produced in vibrant, unapologetic colours. They balance the rawness of a gig poster with the detailing of reduction woodcut landscape. Listening to Mercy talk about queer space you can hear the love in her voice. 

“I just realised how much I loved queer spaces. I love being in them when the lights are on and the party's over, seeing what’s written on the wall and in the bathroom. You see the history of the lives of the people who have come through and the marks that they have left.”

Pony, a bar in the traditional gayborhood of Seattle called Capitol Hill, is a particular love of Mercy. “Gays know how to make a space. There are giant papier-mâché dicks hanging from the ceiling,” Mercy says of Pony. She loves these big, gaudy decorations, the ones that lean so far into celebrating the nature of the space that they almost fall over, but it’s also the little details that few people might have noticed, or that perhaps are just inside jokes within the staff that she’s after documenting. Behind the bar at Pony there is a mosaic of cut up credit cards, the remnants of years of intoxicated patrons wandering off into the night and forgetting to close out their tab. In the dressing rooms at drag shows there are collections of lipstick smudges on the counter. All of these details represent stories for Mercy and the idea that these places could disappear through gentrification breaks her heart. Capitol Hill itself has gone through a dramatic transformation in the last five to ten years, one that has been almost universally unwelcomed by the people who had called it home for decades before. Amazon changed the face of Seattle, which at one point in the last few years was the fastest growing city in the nation. With all those bodies moving in, many getting paid tech-level salaries and demanding shiny new apartments the historical spaces and relatively affordable rent all but vanished in the blink of an eye, along with many of the traditionally queer spaces. The neighbourhood changed from what had been for generations a safe-haven for queer people from all over the West Coast, to one that has bucked the national trend by actually seeing an increase in gay bashinges. 

Queer spaces represent safety and community for people who may have never experienced them before moving to a city large enough to be welcoming. This is a story that Mercy has lived herself coming from Yakima to Seattle. So her interest in documenting these spaces goes well beyond an aesthetic interest. She states her long term plans as wanting to document queers spaces through fine art, get into the academic spheres, and make the argument that these queer spaces need to exist. They need to be, in her words “open, alive, and thriving”. She is taking these spaces and bringing them into the light and honour of arts space.

To understand Mercy’s art fully, and her as a person, you need to know that a lot of her life is spent in wigs, dancing and singing along to Kate Bush. She loves everything about drag most of all the people, her drag moms, sisters, and daughters, the performance of gender, and the fact that drag is some of the best performance art out there. It can make you laugh and cry at the same time taking away from the reality of this troubled world. It is through drag that she has access to many of the behind the scenes elements of the queer spaces. Mercy wants you to remember them when they’re gone and support them and love them while they are here. They are not only places where she has shared so many successes and heart breaks with members of her community, but also has had opportunities to connect and receive guidance and love from queer elders. She loves to be able to connect to her community and share intergenerational creative energy.

For Mercy, the community she found through drag is not so dissimilar from that which she found in printmaking. “I find printmaking to be the gayest art, in general,” she muses. It is the aspect of helping each other with one’s art and the way in which the collective supports the individual where she sees the connection. Whether she’s reaching across a press bed or a makeup counter, the person on the other side is more likely than not, willing to lend a kind and discerning ear, or words of encouragement. “It makes art less scary when you can be in open conversation with other artists,” she says.

She has found so much support and meaning through her communities that Mercy has taken on being an organiser and a builder herself. While attending the SGCI conference in Atlanta, she found herself wondering where her fellow queer printmakers were. So the following year in Las Vegas she organised an event simply called Queer Space, and invited her community to meet and connect with one and other. The significance of being able to make work along side of other members of the queer community is vastly important to developing a diverse and extensive dialog for Mercy. Particularly when one is making work about the queer experience. The ability to receive feedback and critique from other members of that community is part and parcel to growing one’s practice. 

Mercy had big plans for SGCI 2020 which was to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this April, which was recently rescheduled over COVID-19 fears. Not to be dissuaded, she is still attempting to travel there during the conference dates and will still fundraising for queer spaces in San Juan.  Mercy is someone who wills what she wants to see into being, but rather than through brute force, she does so with boundless enthusiasm, copious amounts of charm, and a ferocity of love rare to find in this world. If you find yourself within one of her communities, count yourself as very fortunate, because she will be undoubtedly in the process of making it a better space.

More information at:

https://www.jessicamariemercy.com/

https://www.instagram.com/jesthedeluxe/