The Meta-Creativity of Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art. Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases. Instead, 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.

Reference: Alexa Meade: Your body is my canvas.

Alexa Meade’s portraits spring from a long-term fascination with the illusions inherent in representational media. Rather than paint on canvas, she applies paint directly to her subjects -- the people, as well as the objects surrounding them and the background. She then photographs the ephemeral installation/painting. The resulting optically treacherous portraits collapse the subject, foreground and background into one continuous plane, challenging the perceptual boundaries between 2D and 3D.

Reference: Alexa Meade: Visual Artist.

A couple of years ago, I began a poetry collection that I came to call `Canvas of the Body.  It was inspired by Arezu Karoobi's curious, remarkable photography: Arezu and the Intentionally Obscured Object of Autobiography.  That collection is very much alive, even though it is dormant on that proverbial shelf.

I think an artist can be a paradigm on a concept I call meta-innovation.  Innovation gets to be so staid, it seems, that people in organizations need to innovate the very notion and process of innovation itself.  Simply, an artist, by nature, is creative.  But can he or she engage in meta-creativity?  Alexa Meade can, and does, and her work adds life to my poetry collection.