On the Threshold of Liminal Space: A Look Back at Megan Seiter’s “Efflorescence" written by Matt Gonzalez
The title of Megan Seiter’s remarkable debut exhibition at Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, which closed at the end of 2023, encapsulated the essence of becoming. “Efflorescence,” denoting the process of a bud becoming a flower, was an apt title for Seiter’s first solo exhibition as she has been making highly refined wax-based colored pencil artwork, typically depicting an assortment of flowers, for nearly two decades.
Press Release for “Beyond the Line” at Dolby Chadwick Gallery
Working with pencil and soft PanPastel, Megan Seiter creates stunningly detailed images of flowers, fruit, and other objects dramatized by lighting and compositional choices. She approaches her subjects in the same way she would a portrait of a person, carefully studying them to capture the subtle nuances that shape their unique character. Her use of realism is, in part, a means of confronting the subjectivity of perspective, with Seiter noting that “no matter how precisely something is rendered, it’s always rendered through the eyes of an individual.” The drawings on view in Beyond the Line expand upon this line of inquiry. Featuring orchids suspended in mid-air with their roots exposed, they were conceived during the pandemic, a period when our understanding of the world and our place in it was upended. “As an artist with a strong proclivity toward botanical still life drawings,” Seiter explains, “I wondered if I could similarly shift our experience of a plant by altering the way we normally see it.”
(Born 1986; lives and works, Oakland)
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