Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Meredith James’s Interdisciplinary Artwork Plays with Optical Illusions

Meredith James is like a latter day Alice in Wonderland documenting what she sees in her journey down and through a contemporary rabbit hole. Her videos, installations, and sculptures play with scale and trompe l’oeil to create optical illusions that are as disruptive as they are funny. In "Day Shift", a short video, she plays a security guard who, having just left work, crawls into the backseat of her SUV and reemerges as a miniature figure in the building's security monitor. In Ames Landscape, an installation, two figures stand in a glade. A large mountain reaches skyward in the distance. The space is configured so that, though the space is logically consistent, one figure stands much taller than the other. In Hallway, another installation, a door opens onto stairs that lead down to the basement. The stairs, of course, go nowhere because the space is flat. The fact that the illusion is a dead ringer for the space's actual stairs that lead to a real basement is not even remotely coincidental.


Ames Landscape

Meredith James is like a latter day Alice in Wonderland documenting what she sees in her journey down and through a contemporary rabbit hole. Her videos, installations, and sculptures play with scale and trompe l’oeil to create optical illusions that are as disruptive as they are funny. In “Day Shift”, a short video, she plays a security guard who, having just left work, crawls into the backseat of her SUV and reemerges as a miniature figure in the building’s security monitor. In Ames Landscape, an installation, two figures stand in a glade. A large mountain reaches skyward in the distance. The space is configured so that, though the space is logically consistent, one figure stands much taller than the other. In Hallway, another installation, a door opens onto stairs that lead down to the basement. The stairs, of course, go nowhere because the space is flat. The fact that the illusion is a dead ringer for the space’s actual stairs that lead to a real basement is not even remotely coincidental.

She says this propensity for disruption stems partially from her stable childhood in New York and her undergraduate years at Harvard. Things she saw in both locations, she says, appeared on the surface to be unchanging. A closer examination, though, revealed that these things were composed of a mash up of elements from different times. Hers is a dynamic aesthetic. She chooses items that appear to be unchanging, things that we take for granted. Things like a security monitor, a landscape, a door. She undercuts this immutability to reveal the flux of time masquerading as a seeming static relationship of things old and things new. It some cases, it provides comic relief. In all cases, it provides an awareness of the way that the past informs the present, even in the most unlikely places.


Day Shift by Meredith James.

See Through


See-Through


Land Lock


Hallway

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Hi-Fructose co-founder Daniel “Attaboy” Seifert offers a new collection of work in a show at Corey Helford Gallery next month. Seifert says that in creating the pieces for “Grow in the Dark,” he was “building paintings,” layering several pieces of wood into 2.5D reliefs. The show kicks off Dec. 2 and runs through Jan. 6. This collection, with themes of mortality, mutation, and rebirth, is the artist’s first show in several years.
Artistic duo Coarse’s recent, entrancing sculpture “States of Matter” comes in two editions of the character Noop: "Trance" and “Cosmos.” The former is a lighthearted, jaunting visit to the beach, while the later takes on a more ominous narrative as Noop moves through water. The pair's sculptures, entrancing in both details and unexpected narratives, take on a markedly seasonal tone with this release.
Alex Ubatuba’s glass “Living Light Sculptures” series recalls both real-life bioluminescent organisms and otherworldly flora and fauna. The glass artist has been developing this specific set of works over the last few years. This surprisingly calming work has found its way at major shows and art fairs, Burning Man, and beyond.
Erika Sanada's ceramic sculptures of puppies and other animals, featured in HF Vol. 31, are sweet yet a little chilling. Her surrealistic pieces give animals a dreamlike quality that draws the viewer in. Their disquieting nature is a reflection of Sanada's own fears and anxieties in her daily life, which she expresses through her artwork. In her artist statement, she calls this her "dark side". Sanada is looking to finally conquer these feelings in her new series, which she is now preparing for her next exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery. Take a look at our photos from Erika Sanada's studio after the jump.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List