Today we’d like to introduce you to Adrienne Elyse Meyers.
Adrienne Elyse, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I was born in Houston and grew up in Houston, its suburbs, and in the woods about an hour outside of the city. I spent time drawing as a kid, and also watching the movement of the land out in the Piney Woods. I think that experience of observation really fed into my interest in creating and recreating images later on. My three siblings and I were homeschooled, which gave a lot of flexibility to experiment and engage with the world creatively. My parents both have a creative streak, and my dad is a graphic designer and painter.
Around the beginning of high school, I started getting serious about photography, working some event and portrait jobs, learning Adobe Photoshop, and taking darkroom photography courses. I brought in my interests in ritual and spirituality that I had developed early on into the work I made during my time in the Photography / Digital Media BFA program at the University of Houston, where I completed a thesis project entitled “Hierophany” that explored the revelatory moment in initiation rites. After graduation, I moved to Boston to complete a studio year in the Post-Baccalaureate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (now Tufts University), then moved to Chicago for the MFA program in Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. During the MFA program, I expanded my work into a body of painted images focusing on interior spaces. This is the work that I am focusing on now.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
My work began as rooted in spirituality, the mythical, haunted, and ritual. A lot of those interests started very early on for me. After the “Hierophany” project, I worked on paintings and drawings that were seeking to call up a sense of sacred or haunted space. During a collaborative project through the Art, Science, and Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago, I worked with two collaborators in the anthropology program on investigating the lines between the sacred and the haunted, how a space or image can slip between the two. This all led into the work that I’m doing now.
I engage with images in order to build a relationship with them, to tease out what they might be hiding. The images I’m working with now are mostly of spaces in and around houses. In these images, we see the room freshly left, the real estate image, the partial reconstruction of a space, or bits of a photograph stripped down to a few elements rendered in paint. I am drawn to images that suggest potential presence and implied aftermath. A room that may have just seen the unraveling of some event, or may have become the acting character itself. I dig at the afterimage, the image that feels familiar, present, but dissolves when approached too closely. In ways, my practice is close to the melancholic in its desire for the character of the image.
What would you recommend to an artist new to the city, or to art, in terms of meeting and connecting with other artists and creatives?
Working together and maintaining a community is a huge part of being an artist. I’m lucky to have a great core community of artists from the three institutions I attended, but social media can also be a useful way to keep up or build new relationships. Although I tend to work in my studio alone, I stay connected by reaching out to other artists to collaborate on projects and exhibition proposals or to go see a show and exchange our thoughts on it. Sometimes it’s running into another artist by chance and having a conversation, other times it’s a more planned discussion or collaboration. The exchange of ideas (not just between artists) is one of the things that helps keep a practice growing.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
One of the best ways to see my work is on my website, www.adrienneelyse.com, or my Instagram, @adrienneelyse, for some updates on work in progress. Now that I’ve finished the MFA program, I’m focusing on making new work and seeking out opportunities to show. Information on any upcoming shows will be posted to my website and Instagram.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.adrienneelyse.com/
- Email: adrienneelysem@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adrienneelyse/
Image Credit:
First installation image: Elisabeth Hogeman
All others: Adrienne Elyse Meyers
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