Artist Statement

Meredith Drum will discuss her recent 3D digital animations, and her choice to employ the trope of the chimera and images of female power from gaming and cinema to explore feminist discourse around gender, sexuality, mutuality and violence, all within a larger consideration of multi-species conflict and interdependence in the capitalocene. Drum’s talk will be founded, in part, on her understanding of Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking, and the motivation she takes from Haraway’s insistence that: “The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures”.

• Meredith Drum, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University School of Art, Tempe, USA. Meredith Drum creates videos and animations as single-screen shorts and multi-screen installations; in addition to her solo work she often collaborates with other visual artists as well as dancers, architects, writers, urban planners, computer programmers and scientists on location-based public projects, movement research, augmented reality apps and books. Her work has been supported by grants and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, iLand, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Paths to Pier 42, the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, ISSUE Project Room, HASTAC and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. She exhibits frequently in NYC with recent shows at Recess Art; the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Radiator Gallery; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the Scope Art Fair; Galapagos Art Space; and internationally at ISEA 2017 Manizales, Columbia; ISEA 2013 Dubai, UAE; Rio de Janeiro’s Environmental Film Festival; Cinema Planeta Film Festival in Mexico City; Museo Valenciano de la Illustracion y la Modernidad, Valencia, ES; and other places. Her research considering mobile media, somatic communication and social critique has been published in scholarly journals including Media-N, spring 2012 (CAA’s New Media Caucus). She has co-produced/released seven kinesthetic Augmented Reality (AR) iOS apps. With artist Rachel Stevens, she co-created The Oyster City Project – a constellation of projects and events that draw attention to relationships between urban marine ecology and urban planning, neighborhood life, politics, economics and environmental justice. One component of Oyster City is an AR walking tour and game featuring 3D objects and text in real space visible with an iOS device that highlights the history and future of oysters in NYC. Another is Fish Stories Community Cookbook a collection of seafood recipes, local histories, stories and drawings alongside ecological information contributed by people who live and work in the Lower East Side of New York City. Fish Stories was compiled and produced by the Oyster City Project for Paths to Pier 42 and distributed at the Paths to Pier 42 Fall Celebration on October 25, 2015. Drum is an Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Arizona State University. With her husband, artist Mitch Miller, and their cats, Cleo and George, she splits her time between Tempe, AZ and Wassaic, NY. meredithdrum.com