bio
Cheryl Meeker is a visual artist based in San Francisco whose work ranges from photography to installation, drawing, painting, archives, video, interactive web projects, and social sculpture often touching on the fundamentals of sustenance in our environmentally destabilized world. A founding member of Stretcher.org, she has frequently collaborated with artist Dan Spencer as the art team Dan and Cheryl, producing actions, panel simulations, and video. Her ongoing activism with the housing and climate justice movements and recent work in the public library system inform her approach. She was one of the organizers of “Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It,” and her work has been exhibited at ATA, Mission 17, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Oakland Art Museum and online at SFMOMA project open space and the Richmond Art Center. Her writing has been published in NYFA Current, Stretcher, and Art Papers. Find further information at https://cherylmeeker.blogspot.com/
artist statement
When working, I vacillate between fresh takes and considered operations, between working solo, with a partner, or with a group. Drawing as a child, doing photography in adolescence, then painting and sculpture in art school, I felt confined by media that made it hard for me to address urgent issues that I was becoming more acutely aware of. Exploring performance and video helped transition my process into a broader sort of intervention. With Dan Spencer, as the art team Dan and Cheryl, we utilize interviews and situational interventions, fusing the tensions of lived interaction with the artificiality of the studio, site, or relational set-up. Actions with the housing and climate justice movements and work in the public library system have informed my work further, and I created hybrid action/art works. My solo work has of late been engaging with historical events, archived material, and the development of ceramic sculpture to bring a somewhat cerebral project into a more urgent materiality.
