Biography

Mead McLean was born in Greenville, SC and maintained a continual yet tangential relationship to art until a defining moment during his studies at Boston University. He found himself spending more and more time drawing and painting and less and less time on his classes, so he decided to make the shift into art. On the advice of friends, he transferred to SCAD, where he developed a passion for art history and conceptual art. His current interest in abstraction began just before his MFA studies and has begun to blend with his fascination for conceptual art. He currently resides in the mountains of Boone, NC, where there is a highly active art scene and plenty of studio space.

On the Work

I make art that has two functions. First, it's made to be visually engaging, and second, it focuses on the limits of human understanding and perception. I like that surface can suggest depth, and I am fascinated by the idea that things we can't directly perceive actually do exist. In science, the quantum world is completely outside of our sensory experience; yet, the math works. We can't perceive most of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we can make use of it. In a superficial sense, I think that the presence of the unperceivable is where science and spiritualism connect. Of course, to make work that is about this limit, each piece has to embody two contradictory experiences at once. On the one hand, there has to be an element of illusion, and on the other, there must knowledge of how the illusion is presented or created.

I liken my work to the experience of viewing a theatrical performance from either side of the front row--you can see the illusion of the play, and you can see behind the scenes. I imagine that, to some people, the ability to see behind the scenes would destroy the illusion and break their immersion in the theatrical world. But what if the work were about the fight between immersion and knowledge? What if a piece of art provided a dual-viewing experience--once as an illusion itself and again as the system that creates its own illusion? That particular question fuels my work, and the process for each series is a metaphor that explores the relationships of systems and their illusions.

The Black Hole series originated with the idea of a painting that contained gravity. The canvases are constructed so that the canvas curves between them as if its gravity distorted the shape. In combination with black lights mounted behind the canvas and panels attached to the wall, the canvas seems to be outlined in vivid light when viewed from a particular perspective. In fact, the panels are painted with black-light reactive paint, which reacts to non-visible UV radiation. Each piece has a specific range of viewpoints that preserve the illusion, but a viewer can easily walk to the side of the piece to see the support structure, lighting, and wiring.

The Collision series began with the simple idea of wet paintings crashing into each other and slinging paint across each other. They are frozen in the moment directly after they have collided, when we can see the evidence of the event, but not the actual occurrence. This is similar to how we typically see two objects collide. Their actual moment of contact is infinitesimally brief--our brains construct the moment that will occur and the moment that just occurred. The moment itself is outside of our experience.

Each piece in the Blast series is a square that has been fragmented and recombined into a complex shape. The text or image on the piece is readable in its original shape but not in its final shape. The fewer the segments, the easier it is to mentally recombine the text, and the more segments there are, the more difficult it is to piece the image back together. The limit of understanding is the point where it's impossible to read the text, even though all of the information is there on the surface.

In many paintings, the edge of the canvas is not the end of the painting's illusionary space--the painting is meant to imply a continuation of its world beyond the edge. Conversely, in most of the objects I create, there is a tendency for them to have what I call an "absolute format" where the edge of the painting is the edge of the illusion. In addition to my main series, I keep up a figure drawing practice because, for some reason I can't quite articulate, I continue to see its relevance. I find that I connect with rhythmic structures in music and art. I'm always searching for physical ways to create metaphors, and I delve into the offshoots of my main ideas on a regular basis. No matter how much I deviate, my projects all seem to center around the presence of the invisible.