Nick Meek: Unrlieable Memories
Artsy | NOVEMBER 27, 2020 - FEBRUARY 14, 2021
De Soto Gallery is pleased to present Unreliable Memories by Nick Meek, an exhibition that explores how the visual mythology of Hollywood shapes conceptions of the past and informs our ideas about the future.
For Meek, growing up in Northern England in the 1970’s, American movies and TV shows gave a glimpse of a starkly different reality than his own that was full of possibility. Even in its depictions of Europe, the silver screen functioned like a romantic mirror for the Old World to reflect back on itself. Mid-century Populuxe and counterculture idealism seeped into Meek’s DNA. Traces of optimism from these cultural artifacts still pulse through his heart, made more precious by the harshness of our current times, like a gem crystallized.
Figuring the present through this prism of the past, Meek adopts a self-consciously visual style. His nostalgic aesthetic — simultaneously hazy and hyperreal, soaked in color and deliberate in its staging — is key to unlocking the collective psyche. Everything is shinier and happier, tugging on the heartstrings more intensely. Despite bearing an overt artifice, there is an undeniable emotional realness that comes with this kind of vicarious remembering.
In mimicking the conjuring of memory, Meek intuitively turns up the volume on the adaptive and constructive part of the process. In essence, remembering entails a certain amount of forgetting. Meek mines this gap, creating space for all kinds of meaning that might not have been there in the first place. The images then become lodged in a constant dialectic: past/present, proximity/distance, real/unreal. The constant negotiation is inherently bittersweet.
By replaying our borrowed histories in such a vivid light, Meek lends energy to the here and now and makes space to rewrite a more ambitious script for what’s to come. With these quick jumps in time and place, Meek remixes the takes, making a hopeful place to reflect on what’s worth keeping as we transform.
Nick Meek (b. 1969, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK; based in London, England and Chamonix, France) has exhibited in the United States and Britain. His work will be included in the time-honored Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, rescheduled for this fall for the first time in its 252 year history because of coronavirus. Meek is most widely-known for his work as a commercial director and photographer, but has always maintained a prolific art practice. Selections culled from his vast collection of personal work comprise a forthcoming monograph (also entitled Unreliable Memories) slated for release next year.