Biography
Anthony Mead is an artist, designer, and educator living in Lexington, KY, and working as the Director of the Morlan Gallery and Instructor of Studio Arts at Transylvania University in the areas of printmaking and graphic design. Mead received his Master of Fine Arts at Arizona State University in 2019 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2010 from Kendall College of Art and Design following studies abroad at Florence School of Fine Arts. Also, in 2010, he co-founded Dinderbeck, a community artist and printmaking studio, in Grand Rapids, MI.
Mead has exhibited nationally and internationally, presented on topics such as the role of digital technology in printmaking and arts education and the history of printmaking at museums and national conferences and taught classes at Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, Arizona State University and Kendall College of Art and Design in the fields of printmaking, graphic design, and art foundations. Mead’s work focuses on concepts related to the universal elements of the human condition such as the use of fire, trade, and the chemical composition of the body and how these relate to human origins, societal development, identity, ecology, and responsibility.
Artist Statement
Life is a series of relationships. Through the action of engaging in a relationship the impact changes who we are, how we experience the world around us, and future actions we make. The foundation of my work explores how the tools we use as humans impact our shared habitat along with our psychology and physiology. We are part of a shared ecology that extends through time, for good or ill. The choices we make have long standing implications on everything from the size of our brains, the health of water in and outside of our bodies, and how we exchange essential resources.
These artworks, created with the techniques of drawing, printmaking, painting, papermaking, digital art, and sculpture, frequently incorporate familiar elements such as burnt wood, paper currency, and spices, materials that transform and change identities through physical and material actions. My heavy use of texture and pattern is influenced by the repetitive forms or patterns found throughout human cultures and natural environments. These are found in everything from camouflage to spiritual ritual, to cultural adornment. Often my use of pattern is derived from charts and infographics such as the growth structures of tree canopies dictated by the Constructal Law of physics or stock market charts. These then become altered to expand ways or knowing and understanding the embedded information.
In my art great interest and intent is placed on process and materiality to consider how we understand the world by navigating a relationship between ourselves our actions and objects. The kind of emphasis and importance we place on shredded U.S. currency formed into paper, then chainmail or the ash of paper that once held someone’s wish. By understanding the meaning of materials and processes of transformation, whether projected or inherent, we can start to understand interconnected relationships more broadly.
In all of my work, the content sits at the intersection of the often-felt separation between what it is to be human and what it is to be natural, oddly different and oddly the same. We so frequently place things into categories or refine them down that they become so isolated into their parts that we no longer see them for what it is, a contextual relationship, dependent on their parts synthesizing together to give them existence and being, the same way that we, as humans, are a series of contextual relationships dependent on the ecological structure we are part of to exist and continue to maintain our being.
Contact
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