Alexa Meade is a 24-year-old artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation.
Rather than creating representational paintings on a flat canvas, Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically compressed into a 2D plane.
Artist's Statement
Growing up in Washington, D.C., I had the opportunity to work as a press intern on Capitol Hill throughout high school and college. Later, I worked as a press staffer on the Obama Campaign. Spending my formative years immersed in the world of politicians and PR led to a fascination with the possibilities of repackaging source texts and adding superficial modifications that would profoundly alter perception. What the audience ultimately unpackaged was a personal interpretation of an already mediated re-presentation.
In my current work, I construct and then photograph ephemeral installation sets that feature an assemblage of found objects and live models, which I have covered in layers of acrylic paint. I paint the surfaces of the human subjects, the material objects, and the architecture of the installations so as to collapse the subject, foreground, and background into one continuous plane. I present my ephemeral portrait/performances as both live, interactive installations as well as permanent photographic indices of these experiences.
By using paint as a mask that mimics the surface attributes of my source materials, I repurpose the common codes of painting and create a reciprocal self-referentiality in which the reference envelops its referent. The time-based portrait/performance installation is mediated through still photography, providing a record of the performative act in which the codes for representation/painting and indexicality/photography converge.
Bio
Alexa Meade is represented by Irvine Contemporary in Washington, D.C. and her art has been exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in New York City, Pool Gallery in Berlin, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. Her work is in private collections in New York, LA, Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Sao Paolo, and Tokyo. Alexa Meade has been profiled in The Washington Post, The London Telegraph, The Guardian, La Repubblica, El Mundo, CNN, The Today Show, PBS, Al Jazeera English, Nippon Television, Globo TV, Art Daily, NY Arts Magazine, American Contemporary Arts Magazine, and Juxtapoz Magazine.
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