Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade, born 1986, is an American installation artist. She is best known for painting portraits directly onto the human body or inanimate objects. Her work makes models look two-dimensional and collapses depth. The result is a photograph of a painting of an individual, with the real person hidden underneath. Trompe-l’oeil is a classic concept that makes a two-dimensional representational picture look like it’s in a three-dimensional space. She does the opposite and makes real life seem like a painting.

Education and early life

Meade was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but was born in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 2009 from Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, with a bachelor’s in political science. She initially planned to pursue a career in politics. Meade interned with senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill and later worked as a press secretary for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Career

Meade was intrigued by an assignment she received in an elective class of Vassar College’s 2009 art course. Meade decided to explore light and space by using black paint on the ground, where shadows are cast. Later, she expanded her idea by creating a grayscale “mapping” of light using paint on the human body. She realized that the three-dimensional form had become a two-dimensional painting by doing so. These experiments changed her outlook and led her to reevaluate what she wanted from her career. Meade grew up in Washington D.C., and was initially keen to go into politics. However, she felt that her dream didn’t align with who she was inside.

She practiced painting on inanimate objects, such as grapefruits, fried eggs, and sausage, after she graduated. Because she didn’t consider painting a task that had to be done on a canvas, she credits her lack of formal art training.

Other projects

Meade’s 2010 work was displayed at the Saatchi Gallery, London. D.C. Camera-Ready Color. She gave a talk at the TEDGlobal conference, Your Body is my Canvas in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2013. In it, she described her career and the beginning of hers. She joined Avicii and other musicians as part of the 2014 TEDGlobal conference.

Alexa Meade’s artwork is still the subject of research and terminology development. Scientific American published an article in August 2019 stating that Meade’s unique work demonstrates depth perception as a brain construct. This is true not only for art, but also for everyday life. Our retinas are flat surfaces so our neurons have to infer the third dimension using cues like shadows, perspective lines, or relative sizes of objects. This is true for both paintings and everyday perception. This brain process is disrupted by Meade’s artistic application of paint.