This intelligent group show, organized by Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak, is as much about psychic and political weather as it is about environmental conditions...[I]n a hand-stitched wall piece by Anna von Mertens, danger becomes specific. Titled "8:45 a.m. to 10:28 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001 (Above New York City Looking Towards Boston)," the piece, which suggests the image of readings on a radar screen, records the position of stars at a fateful moment in recent history.
—Holland Cotter, "Art in Review: Prevailing Climate," New York Times, Friday, August 11, 2006, B30

Anna Von Mertens's quilts are works of extraordinary depth and complexity. Composed of bold colors in broad geometric patterns, Von Mertens's quilts at first glance resemble color field paintings or minimalist sculptures. Up close, however, it becomes apparent that Von Mertens has superimposed multiple systems and layers of meaning in a single piece, merging the psychological with the geographic, the aesthetic with the scientific. The Spark episode Needlework follows Von Mertens as she begins work on her new series of three quilts, provisionally titled Gray Area.
—Excerpt of descriptive text for Needlework, on Spark, KQED Public Television, first aired May 26, 2004
Click here to download the Needlework video from KQED's website:
http://www.kqed.org/spark/artists-orgs/annavonmer.jsp

The stitches that hold together sculptor Anna Von Mertens's hand-dyed abstract quilts diagram mapping systems, scientific phenomenon, and forms of knowledge both intimate and institutional. A recent diptych titled Black and White contains delicate threads that delineate the energy patterns of a nuclear explosion, the mushroom cloud's perfect symmetry offering a surreal contrast to the chaos and annihilation instigated by its detonation. Von Mertens's two new works for BAN4 show a further interest in investigating the physics of dispersed energy. The stitches in one sculpture depict an AutoCAD drawing of the scatter pattern of an exploding military tank, while the other focuses on the vanishing point of a hundred straight white lines that appear to simultaneously implode and explode in an optical illusion. Von Mertens translates the concept of thermodynamic entropy-the theory that everything moves spontaneously in the direction of maximum chaos or disorder-into our current place and time in the globalised world, where everything is growing closer together as it drifts further apart.
—Berin Golonu, Bay Area Now 4 catalogue text, 2005

"The otherwise remarkable recent museum exhibition of quilts created by a group of women who live in the isolated African American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Ala., was seriously marred by unwitting condescension. The quilts were hung on the wall, and many art critics promptly gushed that they were great because they looked liked abstract paintings.
But who knows? Maybe abstract paintings, first made by establishment white men, are great because they look like quilts made by disenfranchised black women.
At Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Bay Area artist Anna Von Mertens fixes the false hierarchy of such irrelevant comparisons by emphasizing her quilts' utilitarian substance as sculptural objects. Each of five quilts-one two-part work and three single panels-is displayed on low white platforms, which act as the Minimalist equivalent of beds. Quilts, like many textiles, spring to life when their bodily associations are manifest.
The patterns Von Mertens stitches in her quilts show fields of energy-a nuclear explosion, a radiating mandala, prism-like rays of color and clusters of arrows that a gallery handout says refer to ocean currents but that also make reference to the directional process of stitching itself. Death, sex, spirit and cycles of life are subtly entwined in Von Mertens's lovely work. All four are greatly enhanced by her savvy decision to lay them out on beds."
—Christopher Knight, "A Debate Put to Rest," Los Angeles Times, Friday, February 18, 2005, E29

"If some dreams are distinctly American, the same can be said of some nightmares. For her first museum solo show, "Suggested North Points" (all works 2003), Anna Von Mertens has translated the geography of the United States into a series of quilts that appear to rest atop a grid of double beds. To create North, South, East and West, Von Mertens hand-dyed fabrics in hues mean to evoke each region, from the electric-orange of a Hollywood sunset to the icy blues of a New England winter. She then assembled bands of the cloth into quilts resembling reclining color field paintings. Each quilt is overlaid with an elaborately stitched pattern inspired by astrophysics or biochemistry: West depicts the Big Bang; North and South reflect aspects of the body's metabolic process. The focus seems to be on the mythic dimensions of American landscape and the absorption and expansion of energy that results from its enormous appetites.
A fifth quilt, Influence, lies slightly apart from the others, its awkward position and black-on-black stitching making it seem both ominous and off-kilter. A field of parallel lines runs diagonally across the fabric's surface, but its uniformity is marred: each ray alters course where it touches an invisible border, allowing the outline of the continental United States to slowly reveal itself. Addressing America's role on the global stage, Von Mertens depicts the country as a patch of black ice, an invisible force that sends whatever it touches careening off course. With its colorless play of lines and angles, Influence is imbued with a grim magnetism, pulling viewers vertiginously toward a pool of obsidian quicksand.
There is something anxious in Von Mertens's exacting stitch work, evidence of a compulsive hand repeatedly signaling toward the unseen forces that impact our everyday existence. In response, one imagines crawling into bed and finding comfort underneath the quilts that comprise the exhibition, much the same way we seek repose through contact with the natural landscape. Cloaked in the kool-aid color fields of a uniquely American geography, we would not rest, but awaken, having learned something about the pleasure and the terror of a country whose will to power should not be mistaken for a force of nature."
—David Spalding, Flash Art review of "MATRIX 207/Suggested North Points" at the Berkeley Art Museum, October 2003

"By portraying the sublime in terms of content-both in the mathematical breakdown of the presentation and in the subject matter-within the confines of a quilt, Von Mertens demonstrates that the sublime may surface in a domestic setting as easily as when faced with an incredible array of facts or a spectacular view of nature. Her work proves that not only does the sublime continue to be relevant in today's world, it is as important as ever. For, as Kant and others have argued, confronting the sublime reminds us of our own limitations and our ability to work within and beyond those limitations. It is an inspiration to persevere in the hope of continuing revelation and wonder."
—Claire Barliant, curator of "Astonishing Knowledge" at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, 2004

"Like other MATRIX artists Teresita Fernandez, Yehudit Sasportas, and Wolfgang Laib, Von Mertens's installation occupies the space of the gallery floor, leaving all of the walls, the traditional location of works of visual art, bare. The floor is a more mundane space, but also a more sacred and ritualistic one, the location of spiritually focused artistic practices from Tibetan mandala practice to Navajo sand painting. For Von Mertens, the placement of her work on the floor falls somewhere in between these two poles of the sacred and the mundane. In a comprehensive and thoughtful approach to another age-old American quest, self-discovery, Von Mertens's sculptural objects and floor drawings rest on the floor for the most basic and honest reason: the floor is where we stand, what supports us literally as we make our way through life, where we are grounded. As if in response to Wallace Stevens's question, Von Mertens's work answers, we stand to behold the sublime right here, exactly where we are, acknowledging where we were, and looking forward to where we might one day be."
—Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator, 2003