WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary presents new gallery artist Alexa Meade and her series of recent photographs during Picture Planes: Robert Mellor & Alexa Meade, June 19 - July 24. Last week, Meade continued her unique portrait series with Anne Goodyear, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Meade’s portraits are executed by painting directly on a subject's body and clothing to render flattened three-dimensional figures in composed sets or staged in real world locations. Alexa Meade's photographs are at once records of a performance, a portrait session, and a reflection on three- and two-dimensional representational spaces. Meade calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium: she presents not simply photography and painting as instances of two-dimensional picture planes, but transforms painted bodies and objects by presenting them as cohabitating within three-dimensional photographic space.

Alexa Meade has created onsite installations for composing a series of live portraits that are photographed and exhibited weekly at Irvine Contemporary during the exhibition.

Alexa Meade
Alexa Meade has a B.A. from Vassar College, and has exhibited in Washington, DC and New York City. She has developed a new direct painting and photography technique in which a model’s skin and clothing are painted as part of a constructed painted installation in which 3-D space appears flattened in a photograph. Her current exhibition at Irvine Contemporary includes on-site portrait performances in unique installations for each photographed portrait. She lives and works in Washington, DC.

Anne Collins Goodyear
Anne Collins Goodyear is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and has been a visiting assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her recent curatorial work includes Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the accompanying book published by MIT Press (2009).