Mekia Machine is a New York based artist; she works across a range of media, from paintings on paper and canvas to music and performance. Exploring the subject of self, she is interested in presenting the body and the intangible essence of ‘us’ rather than merely a conventional portrait. In a quest to reimagine the self, Machine ‘misplaces’ and reorders the identifiable units that indicate we are looking upon an image of a person; in the process she creates revealing, psychologically charged images.
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Storytelling, her own and others, is embedded in her practice. Machine mines her memory, and terrifying stories in the news, to create positive fictional narratives of alternative futures for people she loves and those she has never met.
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At the core of her practice, which she thinks of as ‘Black Abstraction’, Machine is continually asking: how can the ugly in our world be shown and shared without scarring the viewer? At the cusp of contextualizing tragic imagery to tell an alternate story of Black bodies not of this world but living in an invented in-between, with images that are like the subjects she explores: bold, abstracted, vulnerable and soft while being colorful, vibrant and honest