Alexa Meade: Your Body is my Canvas
Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. She selects a topic and then paints it, literally. She covers everything in a scene: people, chairs, food, you name it, in a mask of paint that mimics what’s below it. In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of the more outlandish results, and shares a new project involving people, paint and milk.
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ABOUT Alexa Meade
“Alexa Meade paints mesmerising, illusionistic portraits directly on to living subjects and found objects in three-dimensional space. She takes a classical concept, trompe l’oeil or the art of making a two-dimensional representation look three-dimensional—and works in an opposite direction.
Her aim is to collapse depth and make her living models into flat pictures. She calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium and “grapples with the heady conceptual terms at stake between painting and photography.” What remains is portraiture in triplicate. “A photo of a painting of a person, and the real person hidden somewhere underneath.”
Alexa herself once said, “I paint representational portraits directly on top of the people I am representing. The living, breathing people underneath the paint disappear, overshadowed by the masks of themselves.”
Her work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Postmasters Gallery in New York City, Galerie Ivo Kamm in Zürich, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. Recently she completed a collaboration with performance artist Sheila Vand entitled MILK: What Will You Make Of Me? submerging her signature painted subject in a pool of milk. Her portrait subjects include such individuals of note as Grammy winning musician Gotye. Alexa is 26 years old and lives and works in Los Angeles.
The VIDEO
