Michi Meko, One Last Smile Before the Undertow: Lamar Dodd School of Art | University of Georgia
“I’m sure people think I’m scattered because I don’t work in a familiar series [or constant medium], but if one is really into the narratives I’m working within then it’s an easy funk groove to follow.”
– Michi Meko
In One Last Smile Before the Undertow, Meko presents a new body of work that acts as navigation maps and movements to convey narratives based in the personal and historic. Mashing up iconography and remixing content to establish new hybridized identities, Meko endows ordinary and rejected objects with spiritual powers, alluding to conditions both physical and psychological.
Michi Meko is an Atlanta based artist who works in a variety of media, ranging from installation, painting, video, sound, and drawing. Throughout his various platforms, his work engages contradictions and paradoxes that he uncovers through examining his personal history, African American folk traditions, and narratives that confront or circumvent established narratives. As Meko describes his process: “I’m sure people think I’m scattered because I don’t work in a familiar series [or constant medium], but if one is really into the narratives I’m working within then it’s an easy funk groove to follow.”
Michi Meko was born in Alabama in 1974. Meko has exhibited widely throughout the Southeast, is represented by Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta, and has work in the permanent collection of the High Museum of Art.
