ALEXA MEADE – SURFACES & DEPTHS

Unlike hardly any other female artist of her gene­ra­tion, the Ame­ri­can artist Alexa Meade (b. 1986) has become vir­tually an over­night suc­cess con­que­ring glo­bal media out­lets. Fol­lo­wing the com­ple­tion of her poli­ti­cal sci­ence degree, she chan­ged direc­tions and taught her­self to paint. Having been first inspi­red by the shadows of trees she obser­ved on the grass, she spent months del­ving into a tech­ni­que that did not con­vey the selec­ted object as a two-dimensional image on can­vas, rather as a repro­duc­tion of its­elf whose sur­face beco­mes the car­rier of its own pain­terly inter­pre­ta­tion. Espe­cially when the sub­jects of the work are living or peris­hable items, such as people or fruits, the ephe­me­ral nature of her pain­ting style is evi­dent and what sur­vi­ves of Alexa Meade’s work is the pho­to­graph.
Both the pain­ting and pho­to­gra­phic tech­ni­ques are so tightly coor­di­na­ted that the result is a flat, two dimen­sio­nal space, which achie­ves trompe l’oeil, wher­ein the third dimen­sion is dis­cer­ni­ble only in cer­tain areas, such as near the eyes or hair. Occa­sio­nally, Meade inte­gra­tes her pain­ted models into the three-dimensional space around them, where she even lets them act (as seen in “Tran­sit” 2009), the­reby repealing the boun­da­ries bet­ween pain­ting, pho­to­gra­phy, per­for­mance and instal­la­tion. Meade beha­ves wit­hin a strai­ght recipro­city to the pre­sent deve­lop­ments in art: Ever since the Renais­sance, artists have stri­ven for the lar­gest pos­si­ble illu­sion of spa­tia­liza­tion; and Meade hides the natu­ral three-dimensional space, redu­cing the object into its own flat per­spec­tive. In col­la­bo­ra­tion with actress Sheila Vand, Meade deve­l­o­ped the 2012 series “MILK,” in which milk is the per­man­ently chan­ging car­rier of paint that remo­ves the spa­tial con­text of the model and adopts a new, ever-changing iden­tity with the flow of color. This series is com­ple­men­ted by some other the­ma­ti­cally rela­ted works that haven’t been pre­viously shown.