Michi Meko’s exhibition at Artpace, While I’m Here…A Different South delves into the artist’s journey from Georgia to Texas and his search for the transcendent moment. Through painting, sculpture, and sound, Meko creates a pathway for the viewer through his anxiety toward a tranquil horizon.
Upon entering, the viewer is drawn toward a black acrylic dome that occupies the center of the gallery. It has a charged, monolithic quality and is lit from the interior by red and blue LED lights, which can be seen through crevices laser etched onto the surface. The contrasting colors oscillate back and forth along the surface, like a conversation. The viewer’s eye is pulled across the dome by the sporadic path of the lights. The experience evokes a sense of anxiety and confusion and, at times, arrives in peaceful suspension, akin to the unfolding of a panic attack. We are left wondering if this is the soul of Meko, a supernatural self-portrait on display for the viewer to interpret and engage.
Two large landscape paintings hang on the north and west walls, which depict Meko’s version of the Texas Hill Country. Each environment is blighted and dangerous, consisting of bleached bones, brooding clouds, and plants that cause pain. It is rendered as tainted with a veil of fog-like aberrations. Here, the viewer journeys through a foreboding, molecular landscape, but we are guided beyond it into a peaceful light source of beautiful blue and gold hues. These visual pathways embody the artist’s profound reflections on ethereal phenomena, methods of ritual protection, and their potential to guide us unscathed through a treacherous landscape.
On the south wall, there are five dark gesso canvases that, upon close inspection, are just off the black mark. The color is slightly watered down, a minimal gesture that gives the work faint depth. The viewer is compelled to look closely at each painting’s surface to find the brushstrokes and the subtle aberrations. Always in search of a transcendent experience that is just out of reach, the artist creates that peaceful moment for himself here. Like a psychological test, Meko asks the viewer, what do you see?
Throughout the exhibit, there is a clear undercurrent of tender resolve by the artist to parse through the darkness of anxiety and depression into the cosmic clarity that often follows. While I’m Here…A Different South, Meko’s search for the transformative moment continues.
