22 Oct Pushing the limits of light: Meagan Streader joins MARS

MARS Gallery is illuminated by the latest inclusion to its family of artists: Meagan Streader.

First spied by MARS director Andy Dinan at NotFair 2017, a series of collaborations since that time has made the liaison concrete. Streader’s work pushes the limits of light within sculpture and installation. Reflecting the Minimalist art of the Light and Space movement, Streader manipulates, reinterprets and extends upon the boundaries of constructed spaces. Through site-specific interventions, her multidimensional use of light re-orientates the viewer’s relationship to the pre-existing architecture and scale of a given space.

Streader is a Brisbane artist currently based in Naarm/Melbourne. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts / Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2010 and she has been awarded numerous arts grants and exhibited both nationally and internationally. She has participated in the Kochi AIR program in India, 2014; and the NARS Foundation Residency, New York, 2016, most recently was awarded the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery Artist Residency, 2020-2021.

Streader has presented major site-specific projects for Dark Mofo (2019), HOTA (2019), Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial (Kyneton, 2018) and notfair Art Fair (Melbourne, 2017), Soft Centre Festival (Sydney, 2017, 2018) and Underbelly Arts Festival, Cockatoo Island (Sydney), Electrofringe (Brisbane, 2015) and Amsterdam Light Festival (Netherlands, 2015).

Streader has been inspired by the stained-glass Art Deco windows of Frank Lloyd Wright and his use of geometry and colour and other such precedents, such as the works of Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin that Streader experienced during her residency in New York in 2016. Her current work is influenced by female artists exploring light, space, illusion and perspective such as Mary Corse, Brigitte Kowanz, Alicja Kwade.

In a feature in Artist Profile magazine, Streader described New York as an “incredible city of neon and Art Deco architecture.” 

“The effect of these influences is clear to see in her precise, symmetrical arrangements,” noted arts writer Soo-Min Shim. “Streader’s focus on formalism and materiality marks a shift from her previous spatial, site-specific installations to ‘a more considered approach to light components and materials’.”

Streader noted that, “The window has been used widely in art history, considered as a metaphor for hope … a silent opening to the unknown.”

Streader will show with MARS in their Christmas group show and at Sydney Contemporary 2022.

Image: Variation ‘O’, at NotFair 2017