Megan Bickel is an artist, digital humanist, writer, and educator currently living and working in the occupied Congaree and Catawba lands (Columbia, South Carolina). Her work considers and utilizes various approaches and technologies such as painting, data manipulation, digital collage, database reconfiguration, and poetry. Bickel’s work has been exhibited at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), University of Chicago Logan Center (Chicago, IL), LADIES ROOM LA (Los Angeles, California), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KY), Georgetown College (Georgetown, KY), QUAPPI Projects (Louisville, KY), Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh), and MADS Mixed Reality Gallery (Milan, Italy), University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) and Institute 193 (Lexington, KY).
She was the founder and organizer of houseguest gallery from 2018-2025, and has had fiction and arts criticism published nationally. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art & Design.
She received her Master of Arts in Digital Studies in Language, Culture, and History at the University of Chicago in 2022. Her thesis research assessed how Google Vision and other related vision models would impact the fate of climate reporting due to current labeling production design. She is currently working on expanding this data set and expanding the research into a book with coauthor Joseph Solis.
She received her MFA from the University of Louisville with Honors in 2021 and her BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Magna Cum Laude.
Artist Statement
Megan Bickel’s practice expands and contracts between painting, virtual reality, ethical data analysis, and writing. Rooted in research surrounding the parallel militarized development of camouflage and digital screen technologies, their work investigates how images announce and conceal meaning across analogue and digital modalities. Through layered painterly surfaces, immersive digital environments, and staged photographic interventions, Bickel constructs unstable fields of perception that interrogate what it means to be visually critical in an era shaped by environmental collapse, artificial intelligence, and networked image culture.
Working within the expanded field of painting, Bickel treats painting less as a fixed medium than as a mutable spatial condition where hapticity renders understanding to nebulous digital experiences. Currently their compositions often begin with digitally manipulated photographs of landscape as found object, or staged landscapes which are assembled alongside virtual artifacts, including screenshots from VR environments and 360-degree films. They are then often printed onto canvas and reworked through paint, reflective textiles, and accumulative mark-making. The pairing of production and painting upon these printed images results in fractured rendered spaces that oscillate between embodied experience and simulation. Influenced by science fiction, Post-Digital painting, and Casualist aesthetics, her work embraces absurdity and sensory disorganization as methods for confronting systems of control, ecological precarity, and contemporary political life.
Across exhibitions and collaborative projects, Bickel’s practice remains committed to constructing imagined environments where imagination and critique coexist.
For Inquiries please email meganmariebickel@gmail.com