Alexa Meade is famously known for selecting a topic, and painting them. Not in the conventional way though, she literally paints them. Meade covers the topic and their surroundings in paint, which she then photographs, subverting familiar visual cues between 2D and 3D through her innovative manipulations of perspective and colour.
Originating from Washington D.C., Alexa graduated with a B.A. in Political Sciences only to discover she wanted to be an artist. Taking a uniquely simple idea of covering natural shadows with black paint, she mapped the light on top of a 3D space. This seminal idea allowed Alexa to create the illusion of the world as a 2D painting. This then prompted the creative focus for her artistic career from which Meade has received critical acclaim from CNN, NPR, Wired and the Wall Street Journal. Following her international artistic influence, Meade has shared her work by lecturing at California Institute of the Arts, UC-Berkeley, National Geographic London, Wired, and the TED Global Conference where her talk “Your Body is my Canvas” has been viewed over 2 million times.
Alexa is said to be expanding her artistic skills into teaching visually impaired adults at the Braille Institute how to create papier-mâché as she collaborates with magicians to transform her L.A. home into a “Fun House” alongside selling limited edition prints of her otherwise ephemeral creations.
Meade seamlessly collapses her subject by foregrounding and backgrounding the visuals into one continuous medium, challenge your own perceptual boundaries here:
