East Gallery
America Meredith
At the Crossroads
January 15 thru March 25, 2007
America
Meredith is a Swedish-Cherokee artist who blends traditional styles
from Native America and Europe with pop imagery of her childhood. Meredith’s
influences range from the Bacone School of painting, the Arts and Crafts
movement, 60’s cartoons, to Mississippian shell engravings. She
incorporates these different traditions and connects them to her own
life and times.
“Common threads run through these schools of art – a love of nature and beauty, an awe of the unseen world, a flattening of space and time, and bursts of quirky humor. My work negotiates the space between the Native and non-Native, the urban and rural worlds, as well as the interactions between humans, animals, plants, and spirits,” explained Meredith.
The works in her exhibit, At
the Crossroads, could be described as
post modern, a term used to describe artistic, intellectual and cultural
ideas and practices that are not easily defined by modernism and, consequently,
occur outside of modernisms predefined era.
Often these practices are so quickly used up or changed that they are unable to sustain a movement status. Meredith’s works can, however, be further defined as eclecticism, a roughly defined movement that draws upon multiple styles and theories used to gain complementary insights into a particular subject. Eclecticism, thanks to its flexible criteria, can be used to describe any post modern work that borrows from diverse styles and movements. Meredith borrows from such diverse styles as medieval iconography, surrealism, realism, pop art and traditional flat style.
Meredith works in pen and ink, serigraphy, monotype printing and beadwork,
but her primary focus is painting – in acrylic, egg tempera,
gouache, and watercolor. She earned her MFA in painting from the San
Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from the University of Oklahoma.
For the last 11 years, she has exhibited her work throughout the United
States and Europe and has won awards at the Heard, the Southwestern
Association for Indian Arts Indian Market, as well as at numerous competitive
shows.
Sponsored by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information contact Scott Cowan or Karen Sharp at 405.521.2931 or scott@arts.ok.gov.
The East Gallery is located on the 1st floor of the State Capitol and open daily from 8:00-5:30.