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Normal Rules Don't Apply
Inside the Painted World of Alexa Meade
Alexa Meade's art always takes me to another dimension, and I never quite fully grasp how she does it. Walking into her installation at 29 Rooms in Los Angeles back in 2017 really made me think about the limits of my perception and how easily the eye can be tricked.
Multicolored coats, hats, parasols, and glasses — all painted over in Alexa's unique style — were hanging on racks, allowing visitors to dress up in her work. I picked out my favorite pieces and walked into a painted room that matched my new outfit and transformed me into a two-dimensional portrait: a spectacular illusion created with Alexa's painting technique. I was, at once, bewildered and in complete awe. How has this artist condensed me into a painting — a mere hologram of my existence?
Behind a crowd of mesmerized faces all waiting in line to experience the magic unfolding before their eyes was the artist herself — fully enthralled in the process and technique she developed in 2009, which involves painting over shadows to compress 3D objects. She was wearing paint-splattered overalls, leaning over a parasol, carefully painting astrological symbols and constellations on its surface. "I like to create a sense of magic and wonder through my art," she explained, "a world where normal rules don't necessarily apply."
Mastering Depth Perception
She was in her senior year of college, finishing her degree in Political Science, when she had the idea to put black paint on shadows. She started experimenting and discovered that by manipulating shadows, she could master depth perception. "Many of our spatial depth cues rely upon information from shadows, and the fact that I am able to take shadows and accentuate them — or dramatically change them in some fashion — makes it merely impossible for people to understand the geometry of that space," said Alexa.
A Decade of Immersion
Alexa Meade has been a working artist for over a decade, traveling the world and collaborating with major brands and musicians — including Ariana Grande, whom she painted for the God is a Woman music video. She has done live activations at Coachella, Cannes Lions, in the middle of Tokyo, and all around the world. In 2018, her Immersed in Wonderland exhibit — inspired by Alice in Wonderland — debuted on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. She took over a 4,000-square-foot space and turned it into a large painted art installation that visitors could walk into and become part of. Most recently, she has been Artist in Residence at Google. "I created a light installation in the Google office that we then captured with their 3D imaging technology Light Fields. With that, we are able to recreate the entire scene in virtual reality or augmented reality," she added.
The Art of the NFT
Alexa's art is part painting, part performance, part installation, part sculpture, part video art — and up until recently, only collectible via limited edition photography. Although her video artwork has been exhibited in museums such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Lincoln Center in New York City, the moving image remained non-collectible. The emergence of NFTs has opened new doors, enabling video art to fall under the category of a collectible artwork and medium.
"I am pretty excited that with this technology, finally this art — that belongs in Lincoln Center — can now belong in an art collection as well. I have an incredible archive of really beautiful video artwork that has finally found its time, and maybe was made ahead of the time in which it could actually be appreciated," said Alexa. Her clips are short loops ranging from 8 to 30 seconds — but for her drop on Nifty Gateway, she released a full five-minute short film.
She first became interested in cryptocurrency in 2012 and owns a physical Bitcoin from back in the day. It wasn't until Beeple's artwork sold for $69 million that she realized she needed to brush up on her technology. "I reached out to people in my network who work in tech and primarily in crypto. I asked them to explain how this all works, and they were able to point me toward people deeper in the NFT space. From that I got invited to private Telegram groups, to speak at Clubhouse panels, and to hang out in places where other NFT artists and collectors meet," explained Alexa.
Milk, Music & Collaboration
She did her first drop on Foundation in early April — five pieces, two of which were collaborations with model Alli Harvard. In May she did a drop with performance artist Sheila Vand: a piece from their milk series, in which she painted on Sheila's body as the artist lay in a pool of milk. That body of work inspired the Ariana Grande music video that received 300 million views. The Alexa–Sheila collaboration was a pivotal moment in her development that led to the evolution of something much greater.
Alexa found the aesthetic of people who collect NFTs to be quite different from those who buy her art in the normal gallery setting. "For NFTs you have to own crypto, and the people making the main purchases are crypto OGs who are fully native in everything in crypto land." That has been a critique of NFTs — that people without a background in fine art are also making the curatorial decisions. "But it's also refreshing to have people outside the confines of the art world lift their voices up. A lot of the artists who have really succeeded as NFT artists wouldn't have a home normally in the gallery art world. I think it's kind of cool that the keys to the kingdom are being handed over to a next-generation business model," she said.
Empowering Female Artists
The statistics — from the 2021 Gemini Report — show that among crypto holders in the US, 74% are male, 77% are under 45, and 71% are white. Female artists are greatly underrepresented in the NFT space, and Alexa has been tirelessly helping them get their voices across. "The technology is intimidating, and you really need a mentor if you want to try to navigate the space. I want to try to help more female artists understand how they can make the most of this technology," she said.
With boundless energy and enthusiasm, Alexa continues to shift perspective in the digital realm — creating ripples in Ethereum and empowering artists like herself.
— Alexa MeadeBy manipulating shadows, I can master depth perception — and make it merely impossible for people to understand the geometry of that space.
