To be seen and not to be seen

Alexa Meade is a young American artist who creates art work that truly challenges our perceptions of what is representational painting and what is real life. She paints directly on top of her subject matter to make it appear that they are two dimensional paintings,  using a mixture of paint, photography, video, performance and installation until subject matter and representation are fused as one.

This imitation of real life while covering real life really challenges me. Is this exposing the need for art to be more in touch and involved in our everyday lives or a statement that we as subject matters are also art, though in a non-traditional sense? By physically painting people is this a direct way of making art unavoidable, showing that we all have the potential to become artists as well as artist's subject matter? Or is this expressing the inevitable front we all have, expressing that it is only a performance, an exterior that has been created that we let the world see? Are we not all performers and therefore all artists? And to complicate matters further what happens when these representations become videos or photographs? In a lot of her work you cannot tell that they are not photographs of regular 2D, flat paintings yet we believe that they are painted 3D models because a source tells us so. Is this not further challenging how we see the world? The photographs (or any Photograph for that matter) is nothing but a snapshot of something that once was- is this a hankering after human permanence?  Or am i going to far with this?

What point she is making or whether she is making one at all is up to you- all art is interpretive to the viewer in any way of course, but either way you can't deny the skill this woman has and the interesting and wonderful and  way she has of viewing the world. If you want to see more of her work and photographs of the creating process visit her flickr.