days painting the props, walls and floors that will
be part of a portrait, with one to five hours fo-
cused on the clothes the model will wear. Then
the model puts on the prepainted clothes, and
Meade paints the face and any exposed skin.
Meade’s unique work illustrates that depth per-
ception is always a brain construct, not only in art
but also in life. Because our retinas are fundamen-
tally flat surfaces, our neurons must infer the third
dimension from cues such as shadows, perspec-
tive lines or the relative sizes of objects—both in
paintings and in everyday perception. Meade’s art-
ful application of paint disrupts this brain process.
In daily vision, our brains also use the small
discrepancy between the left and right eye imag-
es to produce stereopsis, the binocular mecha-
nism that allows you to see depth in 3-D movies
or in the Magic Eye books. Stereopsis cues are
absent in paintings, which helps explain why even
masterpieces often seem flatter than actual land-
scapes. Meade’s artworks look even flatter in
photographs than in real life, because photogra-
phy removes stereo cues.
The artist offers some advice for enhancing
the artifice when you visit her installations: watch
the artwork with one eye closed (to prevent ste-
reopsis) and “frame it off as if through a window”
to remove any leftover depth cues, rendering life
into art.
ALEXA MEADEILLUSIONS