Meagan and a bowl full of guts.

Meagan Seagal was one the last students I worked with intensely while teaching at Pratt. She is quiet and tiny in stature. Her paintings are small with surfaces reminesant of old master paintings. She uses layer after layer of thin washes and then pushes big blobs of paint around in order to create paintings that not only look like your stomach out on the dinner table for you but feels like it too. Meagan’s obsession is clear but the cause of the obsession is unclear leaving the viewer with a sense of nausea flavored with elation. She does not ask us to understand her subtle love and hate of the things that lay beneath the skin. She does ask us to participate in the act of looking at the things that which we cannot do with out. At the same time she tells us that these innards can be quite troubling either in reality or in our minds. She won’t let us forget that we are all very much alike beneath the clothes and faces we put on day in and day out. For this I thank her and praise her beautiful play on the grotesque.