A few months ago I stumbled onto an artist’s website whose work absolutely stunned me by its originality and delivery.

The artist is DC area’s own Alexa Meade, whose work has re-invented the Trompe-L’Oeil painting technique so that it can perceptually compress three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane. Her work is a refreshing new fusion and artistic marriage of installation, painting, performance, photography, and video art.

Rather than painting a representational picture on a flat canvas, board or paper as the rest of us do, the Vassar College graduate paints her representational image directly on top of her three-dimensional subjects. The subject and its representation become one and the same.

Essentially, her art imitates life on top of life.

Meade’s approach to portraiture questions our understanding of the body and identity.
Meade coats her models with a mask of skillfully applied paint, obscuring the body in a technically superb mimicry of brushy paint, while intimately exposing it from a psychological perspective, creating an unflinchingly raw account of the person.

The painted second skin perceptually dissolves the body into a 2D caricature. The subjects become art objects as they are transformed into re-interpretations of themselves. In turn, the models’ identities become altered by their new skin, embodying Meade’s dictated and forced definition of their image to the viewer.

Meade’s project plays on the tensions between being and permanence. The physical painting exists only for mere hours and is obliterated when the model sheds its metaphorical skin. What endures is an artifact of the performance, a 2D photograph extracted from the 3D scene. The photographic presentations create a tension between the smoothness of the physical photographs and the tactility of the painted installations captured within them, blurring the lines between what is depicted and depiction itself.

This is such a refreshing new approach to the 21st century dialogue of art, that it defies labels and categorization, but certainly delivers a strong new presence in the arena of contemporary art. The exhibition at Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC goes through July 24, 2010.

Wall Mountables coming to DCAC

One of the really good things about living in the Greater DC area is the multitude of opportunities that artists have to expose their work to the public. One of the best, in my own experience, is the District of Columbia Arts Center’s (DCAC) 1460 Wall Mountables, DCAC’s annual open exhibition. On Wednesday, July 21 DCAC will open its doors at 3pm, beginning a three-day installation process during which artists can purchase up to four 2' x 2' spaces to hang their work.

Since the first Wall Mountables in 1990, the exhibition has become a celebrated summer tradition at DCAC. One of the center’s most important fundraising events, the open exhibition runs from July 23–August 29.

Spaces sell on a first-come, first-serve basis. It’s not unusual to see returning participants lined up outside DCAC’s door by 2:30pm, patiently waiting for installation to begin with an eye towards grabbing the galleries prime wall space. All work is accepted from a wide range of media created by artists at various stages in their careers.

The exhibition provides a great opportunity for experimentation, as artists challenge themselves to make the most out of such limited space. The coveted $100 “Best Use of Space” prize is presented during the opening reception to the artist who makes the most innovative use of their 2’ x 2’ squares.

The District of Columbia Arts Center is located at 2438 18th St. NW Washington, DC 20009 and their phone is 202.462.7833.

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