Meg Lewis
Meg Lewis is an experimental graphic-based installation artist who has exhibited in New York and Florida. Recent exhibitions include multiple showings at Collin Chase Gallery as well as group shows at CCNY Planetarium and Parsons in New York.
The research-based practice of Meg Lewis entails study and documentation into spirituality, science, and history, specifically in relation to depicting pixelated forms of herself. Her interdisciplinary practice ranges from motion graphics, digital art, digital-based installations, moving-image, and experimental installation-based sculpture. When we study these pixelated, montaged, collaged, and distorted forms, we will find a vivid distortion of the artist, as if she were ‘erasing’ herself from existence. Some instances of works appear like moments of enlightenment or ascension into the heavens. Meg’s complex love-hate relationship with Christian theology has created complex identity questions which become surfaced into metaphorical and symbolic pixelated imagery, such as images of her distorted self with partial angel wings.
These assemblage-like installations and graphics based in self-portraiture can ultimately be described as distorted avatars, masks, and apparitional notions. We will find in the works, they can range to overtly figurative, to symbolic, to pixelated disassembled form. These dream-like sequences are meant to be fluid and represent a grand disillusion of the self, a loss of identity within the information age, becoming lost within the endless flow of digitized data. As a result, these works are anti-narrative, anti-surveillance, and can be described as quite rebellious, seeking to liberate the self from digitized and socially-imposed tyranny within the information age. Representing both religious iconography and art historical symbolism, Meg Lewis is deconstructing imposed historically-based narratives on the self and society. In other words, she is essentially creating her own sense of mythology through these digitized collages and installations.
Precious A Soul Being Carried to Heaven (pictured above) is a self-portrait graphic of the artist in a pixelated bikini on mylar with a miniature pale version of herself as an angel with wings ascending from her hands. The main portrait is split in two, as if she is divided within herself. This piece represents ascension and enlightenment as well as an escape from earthly disturbances.
Such a highly interdisciplinary research-based practice by Meg Lewis based in subverting the artificial aspects of society, particularly through digitization, reveals a profound institutional criticism. Her practice based in themes of ascension, escape, the ethereal, infiltration, destabilization, self-erasure, and confinement conceptually convey a release of her own essence, symbolically trapped within the digitized aspects of society. In a way, these works are an indirect criticism of overarching tech-oligarchs and the surveillance-based tech-oligarchy which watches over us all. These poignant works based in vivid distortion, pixelation, symbolism, and anti-narrative interpretation are thoroughly experimental and reveals the encompassing darkness of our world as well as showing us a path on a means of escape.
