Tuesday 30 August 2011

Still Life Alive : Alexa Mead





Alexa Meade's art work is amazing as it pushes the boundaries of fine art and performance. She 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.


Transfixed

Julie

Jamie


Natura Morta


Sara

Self Portrait

Ann

Timmy

Transit
 
Bernie


Spectacle

Exchange


 Blueprint


Aligned

Mediation

Curated

Self Portrait

Double take

Split in Two 


I would love to see Alexa's work for real, it looks raw and real and somehow confusing. Eerie, as the art looks back at you.

Of her work Alexa says: 


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.



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