The Paintings of Alexa Meade
Illusions in Progress
by Jackie Clay • July 27, 2015
During daytime hours next week on Tuesday, August 4 and Wednesday, August 5 and evening hours on Thursday, August 6, artist Alexa Meade will bring her performative and illusory painting techniques to our exhibition floor. Meade paints live three-dimensional subjects and renders them -- for a moment or through the camera’s lens -- as two-dimensional expressionist works.
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(Image credit Alexa Meade)
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Meade’s mind-bending work crystallizes the After Dark: Illusions theme and some of our core goals at the Exploratorium: inquiry-based learning using hands-on, accessible methods to explore our complicated relationship to perception.
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Off the Wall – Alexa Meade JAY Z's Life & Times (Image credit Alexa Meade)
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Meade’s work stands in a long tradition of still life painting and photography, trompe l’oeil, and most obviously portrait painting. Meade and her assistants work in front of, but not explicitly for the audience.
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Artist Alexa Meade in process (Image credit Alexa Meade)
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Meade encourages her audiences to participate as documentarians and sometimes, even insert themselves in her works. For her installation at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., visitors watched, posed through frames within the tableau, snapped pictures and shared on social media platforms. By encouraging sharing, Meade symbolically hands the “magic that the camera adds” to her active viewer.
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Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (Image credit Alexa Meade via alexameade.com)
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When you come next week, enjoy the wonder of Meade’s illusion, her practice of performative painting and make sure to tag #exploratorium. Learn more and get tickets to After Dark: Illusions here.
