LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY X VINTAGE MARTINI
Archival Fashion in Dialogue with Leigh Merrill’s Window and Wind: Exploring Fragmentation, Archive, and Time Through Digital Collaboration
Liliana Bloch Gallery and Vintage Martini are pleased to announce a digital collaboration centered around Window and Wind, Leigh Merrill’s current exhibition on view at the gallery. Bringing together contemporary photographic practice and archival fashion, the collaboration explores shared ideas surrounding construction, temporality, fragmentation, and the reworking of existing material.
Through a series of digitally composed images, archival garments from Vintage Martini will be placed in dialogue with selected works from Window and Wind, creating parallel visual constructions that unfold over the duration of the exhibition.
About Window and Wind
In Window and Wind, Leigh Merrill uses photography as a means of thinking through how we construct reality. Working with thousands of photographs from diverse geographical locations, Merrill layers, redacts, and recombines fragments into imagined spaces that feel both familiar and unstable. The resulting images collapse multiple places and moments into a single frame, reflecting and reinventing the spaces we inhabit.
Merrill’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in collections such as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Texas Tech University, and the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. Learn more about Leigh Merrill’s work here.
About Vintage Martini
Vintage Martini is a Dallas-based vintage archive and retail space recognized internationally for its museum-quality collection of garments spanning multiple decades, including rare couture and historically significant fashion. Founded by Ken and Greg, whose backgrounds in costume design and fashion history informed the development of the archive, their work extends beyond preservation into the careful curation and recontextualization of fashion as a form of cultural and visual history.
Over the years, Vintage Martini has grown into a globally recognized destination for rare and collectible fashion, working with major fashion houses and collectors while building an archive rooted in decades of research, sourcing, and connoisseurship. They were recently named one of the best vintage stores in the world by Vogue and currently represent and sell the archives of the French couture house Pierre Cardin.
Learn more about Vintage Martini here.
Fragmentation, Archive, and Time
Both Merrill’s work and Vintage Martini operate through fragmentation and assembly, constructing meaning through the layering and recombination of fragments drawn from different places, decades, and contexts. There is also a shared engagement with the archive as material: Merrill works from an archive of images of place, while vintage garments function as archives of past identities, histories, and cultural moments—each reactivated in the present through recomposition.
Time similarly becomes layered rather than linear, with past and present coexisting within a single image or look. As Christopher Breward writes in Fashion and Modernity, fashion functions as a system through which individuals situate themselves in time and construct identity through change, while Allan Sekula describes the photographic archive as a structure that produces meaning rather than simply recording it.
The Collaboration
For the collaboration, Vintage Martini has styled a series of archival looks on mannequins, which are then digitally placed in dialogue with selected works from Window and Wind. Rather than directly illustrating the artworks, the compositions function as parallel constructions—exploring atmosphere, fragmentation, and spatial ambiguity through both image and dress.
The collaboration will unfold digitally through a series of joint Instagram posts shared by Liliana Bloch Gallery and Vintage Martini throughout the exhibition, with a second newsletter to follow exploring the conceptual relationship between the exhibition and archival fashion more deeply.
Window and Wind remains on view through July 11 at Liliana Bloch Gallery. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday, 12–5 PM, and by appointment.
Vintage Martini is open Monday through Saturday from 11 AM–6 PM and Sunday from 12–5 PM.
Stay tuned as the series unfolds over the coming weeks!
Featured Works
Leigh Merrill:
Orange Building, Orange Leaves, 2025 archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper
&
Canopy, 2025 archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper, 16 x 16 inches (Framed size 18 x 18 inches