Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically compressed into a 2D plane.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Meade had the opportunity to work as a press intern on Capitol Hill throughout high school and college. Later, she worked as a press staffer on the Obama Campaign. Spending her formative years immersed in the world of politicians and PR led to a fascination with the possibilities of repackaging source texts and adding superficial modifications that would profoundly alter perception. What the audience ultimately unpackaged was a personal interpretation of an already mediated re-presentation.

In her current work, Meade constructs and then photographs ephemeral installation sets that feature an assemblage of found objects and live models, which she has covered in layers of acrylic paint. Meade paints the surfaces of the human subjects, the material objects, and the architecture of the installations so as to collapse the subject, foreground, and background into one continuous plane. She presents her ephemeral portrait/performances as both live, interactive installations as well as permanent photographic indices of these experiences.

By using paint as a mask that mimics the surface attributes of her source materials, Meade repurposes the common codes of painting and creates a reciprocal self-referentiality in which the reference envelops its referent. The time-based portrait/performance installation is mediated through still photography, providing a record of the performative act in which the codes for representation/painting and indexicality/photography converge.

Alexa Meade's artwork has been featured in The Washington Post, The London Telegraph, The Guardian, USA Today, Spiegel, La Repubblica, AOL.com, Yahoo! News, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, "The Today Show," Al Jazeera, Nippon Television, NY Arts Magazine, American Contemporary Art Magazine, Art Daily, Art Info, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz Magazine, Huffington Post, Slate Magazine, Wired Magazine, Nylon Magazine, and Elle Magazine. Her art has been exhibited at Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC, Postmasters Gallery in New York City and at the Saatchi Gallery in London.