MADA Monash University
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Fine Art
Location: Melbourne, Australia
First Name: Sam
Last Name: Meekan
Specialisms: Painting / Drawing / Fine Art
Sectors:
My Location: Melbourne, Australia
University / College: MADA Monash University
Course / Program Title: fine arts BA Hons
Sam Meekan is a contemporary painter living and working in Melbourne/Naarm. A youth of participation in ‘hobby’ subcultures, particularly, Warhammer 40k, has led to an analytical, gamified, approach to painting within the formal and semiotic components of the pieces. Each action undertaken is a move implemented over the playing field that is the painting’s surface to achieve a win condition, (a finished painting) his opponent, the painting itself.He has exhibited both locally and internationally with highlights being: Seventh Gallery and HAIR ARI (Melbourne) and the Tokyo Metropolitan museum (Japan).
Meta-gamed painting: what Is the bare minimum required effort to create a passably finished painting / or for maximum effect on the viewer. Each of the component of Modular Feed (2024) is the exact same dimensions, (1050x1222x20 mm) allowing them to be reorganised ad-nauseam for a desired effect. It is recursive, the piece is undeniably one contained painting, yet a component divorced from its compatriots remains its own standalone artwork. Similarly, their standardised format, materials and processes allow the viewer to slide across each of the individual plains, painting to painting, page to page, screen to screen. Akin to a scrolling action the viewer is trapped in brief hits of recognition within their time with the piece. The overt reliance on airbrush mimics the spontaneity of digital image generation, instantaneously frozen as paint hits surface, rendered ambivalent despite the freneticism with which the marks have been applied This is the thesis of Modular Feed; brutal automatist function, inane marginalia forming the pretence of a coherent statement as onomatopoeic gesture