ARTIST STATEMENT​

​

My Battery is Low and It’s Getting Dark is a small exhibition of paintings by Megan Bickel. Bickel’s work expands and contracts between paintings, ethical data analysis, and writing about subjects that oscillate between announcing and concealing meaning. Stemming from formal research into the parallel militarized development of camouflage and digital screen technologies; her paintings push and pull sensory depth, detail, and narrative by shifting perspectival planes and senses of color and material; resulting in a cultivation of mysterious and unserious fields of imagery that interrogate what it means to be visually critical now and in the future. She embraces an absurdity within painterly abstraction amidst fictionalized landscapes that often include reflective materials such as sequined textiles or holographic modeling cloth.​

​

Currently the paintings come from photographs of staged scenarios that have been digitally edited or manipulated, printed using a wide-format inkjet printer on canvas, and then painted upon. These textiles are often installed and documented amongst grasses, bodies of water, or construction zones. The varying parts are digitally assembled alongside virtual artifacts such as screenshots from her VR films produced using Unity or 360 footage, and photos of painted marks.

 

The myriad components push the definitions of the environment and space that the paintings are often describing. The integration of reflective materials in the landscape naturally disorganize our perception of the presented space and contribute to an experience that Natalie Weis described in her Hyperalleric review of her recent exhibition, Orgonon, at Institute 193 as “a vibrant and disquieting sense of what it feels like to be alive right now: to witness a flourishing of creativity amid war and environmental destruction and to sense an uneasiness with artificial intelligence even as we’ve come to depend on it in our daily lives and interactions.” Informed by the aesthetics of science fiction and Casualist and Post-Digital Painting, Bickel’s work often cultivates imagined spaces (both real and painterly) that confront the economy and understandings of class in contemporary art, and politics through fantasy.

Recent bodies of work explore the iconography of safety in the outdoors as a visual metaphor for systemic control and (mis)management. In collapse and compartmentalization, we see safety cones, plastic netting, and fencing amongst rocks. Utopian agrarian landscapes expand and contract. The wilderness merges and breaks with holographic textiles reflecting in the light. The images use the wilderness–or the imitation of–alongside visions of safety to question illusions of control and its relationship to state control and complicity in the climate crisis; and what happens when we begin to imagine beyond that corporal reality.

​

BIO

​

MEGAN BICKEL

Megan Bickel is an artist, writer, digital humanist, organizer, and educator working out of Columbia, South Carolina. Their work considers and utilizes various approaches and technologies such as painting, data manipulation, digital collage, databases, and poetry. Bickel’s work has been exhibited at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), University of Chicago Logan Center (Chicago, IL), LADIES ROOM LA (Los Angeles, California), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KY), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), QUAPPI Projects (Louisville, KY), Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh), and MADS Mixed Reality Gallery (Milan, Italy) amongst many others. Reviews or mentions of her work have appeared in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Ruckus, NewCity, and others. They are the recipient of the Great Meadows Professional Development Grant (2024) and several residencies awarded through the Kentucky Foundation for Women, an organization that prioritizes residential opportunities for women and femme artists whose work has feminist and activist provocations.

​

She is the founder and organizer of houseguest gallery (2018-current) where she organized and curated works by emerging and underserved artists and curators. They’ve had arts criticism, science fiction, and images published in Burnaway, Anarchist Review of Books, Sixty-Inches-from-Center, Ruckus, and others. She is the Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of South Carolina, Co-Director of Outreach for Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville and an analyst at Regionalist Data Studio.

She is also a gardener and cyclist, avid napper, lazy power lifter, proud dog and cat mom.