Megan Bickel is an artist, digital humanist, writer, and educator currently working out of 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’s Vision API 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.
Artist Statement
My work expands and contracts between paintings, ethical data analysis, and writing about subjects that oscillate between announcing and concealing meaning. Stemming from formal research into the parallel militarized development of camouflage and digital screen technologies; my paintings push and pull sensory depth, detail, and narrative by shifting perspectival planes and senses of color and material; resulting in a cultivation of mysterious and unserious fields of imagery that interrogate what it means to be visually critical now and in the future. I embrace an absurdity within painterly abstraction amidst fictionalized landscapes that often include reflective materials such as sequined textiles or holographic modeling cloth.
Currently the paintings come from photographs of staged scenarios that have been digitally edited or manipulated, printed using a wide-format inkjet printer on canvas, and then painted upon. These textiles are often installed and documented amongst grasses, bodies of water, or construction zones. The varying parts are digitally assembled alongside virtual artifacts such as screenshots from my unpublished VR films produced using Unity or 360 films, and photos of real painted marks. The myriad components push the definitions of the environment and space that the paintings are often describing. The integration of reflective materials in the landscape naturally disorganize our perception of the presented space and contribute to an experience that Natalie Weis described in her Hyperalleric review of my recent exhibition, Orgonon, at Institute 193 as “a vibrant and disquieting sense of what it feels like to be alive right now: to witness a flourishing of creativity amid war and environmental destruction and to sense an uneasiness with artificial intelligence even as we’ve come to depend on it in our daily lives and interactions.” Informed by the aesthetics of science fiction and Casualist and Post-Digital Painting, my work often cultivates imagined spaces (both real and painterly) that confront the economy and understandings of class in contemporary art, and politics through fantasy.
Recent bodies of work explore the iconography of safety in the outdoors as a visual metaphor for systemic control and (mis)management. In collapse and compartmentalization, we see safety cones, plastic netting, and fencing amongst rocks. Utopian agrarian landscapes expand and contract. The wilderness merges and breaks with holographic textiles reflecting in the light. The images use the wilderness–or the imitation of–alongside visions of safety to question illusions of control and its relationship to state control and complicity in the climate crisis; and what happens when we begin to imagine beyond that corporal reality.
For Inquiries please email meganmariebickel@gmail.com