Meredith Starr

                                                Photo credit Kharis Kennedy

Photo Credit Junko Ima

Meredith’s Cross Country Love and Plastic Lakes were recently a part of the “American Wilderness” Exhibit at Art Lab Tokyo from Nov 21-30, 2019

From the press release: “The concept of “wilderness,” untamed land lacking conspicuous traces of human activity, has existed as an essential fantasy in the American psyche. True wilderness may be physically disappearing every day but that does not stop us from recrafting from scratch or redefining wilderness so that we may explore and escape.

As part of an artist exchange, five American artists from the Wayfarers collective in Brooklyn, New York create an exhibition of new works at Art Lab Tokyo. These new works developed in the US. Curated by the artists, the work explores wilderness graphically and metaphorically.”

Thank you to Cultural Attache to the American Embassy, Mr Michael Turner, for visiting the exhibit! PRESS

 

 

                                                    Photo Credit Ante Mag

Installation view, “Anthropocene Blues” (painting, Maureen O’Leary and installation, Meredith Starr)

Photo Credit: AnteMag

Meredith recently had her work featured in Wayfarer Gallery’s Anthropocene Blues Exhibit curated by Jane Ursula Harris. Here is an excerpt from her press release about the exhibit: 

“While a quick search on Google reveals several sources for the origins of the phrase Anthropocene Blues, this exhibition takes its name and inspiration from an eponymous Anne Waldman poem of 2012. With an almost quaint ring to it, the term’s reference to our growing social anxiety over the impending death of nature is nonetheless gravely real. Waldman, one of the last great living Beat poets, reminds us of that in her poem, its opening stanza reading like an elegy:

sound de-territorializes
weather
and my love clings to you
sings to you
in the “new weathers”
within a tragedy
of the Anthropocene

In organizing the Wayfarers exhibition around this elegiac theme, I hope to also sound a clarion call, echoing Waldman’s impetus for her poem, which she describes as “alarm at the continuing prevalence of climate change ignorance and the thrust of recent political events.” The following descriptions offer a way to consider the exhibition’s individual works in this context….

Meredith Starr’s Plastic Pool/ Look At What We’ve Done, 2019, is a circular installation of shard-like shapes cut from plastic bags (shown here in a smaller, modified version) that underscore and transform its base materials. The plastic bags are sourced from packaging that the artist has personally accumulated, and as a “commentary on our throwaway culture” confront us with the environmental toll our need for convenience incurs. While the title may invoke images of backyard pool parties, and suburban vernacular, the specter of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, with its giant islands of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean, also comes to mind.”

And thank you to Ante Mag for great coverage about the exhibit! PRESS

“Meredith Starr’s almost obsessively crowded installation Plastic Pools/Look At What We’ve Done suggests, in miniature, the overwhelming amount of plastic that we have hoarded and discarded through our rampant consumerist attitudes.”

 

Meredith was recently interviewed for the FATE (Foundations in Art Theory and Education) Organization’s Podcast- Positive Space. In Episode 22 she discusses her FATE regional event, staying observant, and her paper that she presented at CAA-Adventures in Gender, Body, Identity: How a Multidisciplinary Course Started a Dialogue on a Rural College Campus. She shares a recent informal experiment she conducted with her Drawing I sections. One section focused on the quality of their drawings-producing fewer drawings while spending more time on each drawing. The other section focused on producing a large quantity of quicker drawings during the semester. She offers many tips & posses thoughtful questions about how creativity informs our daily lives as artists & educators. Listen here: PRESS