Kate Meehan
‘Sunbed’(2016)
Video installation
In this series of videos, Kate Meehan explores the futuristic potential of the tanning booth to comment upon “how technology has become integral to the way we now live and how it has facilitated the posthuman world.” Meehan argues that “Technology has the power to enhance the body far beyond rigid binaries and capitalist goals. The new construction of self is conceptual rather than natural. Uniformity is well and truly in the past. These new versions of what individuals can be do not prescribe to familiar old notions.
Meehan’s art practice intersects social and political theory, cultural politics, gender and feminist theory. She creates interdisciplinary work that covers most media, but mainly performance, installation, video and writing. Speculative and science fiction are integral to her work, as they offer opportunities to visualise alternative narratives and social structures to those in which we live. Heavily influenced by feminist and queer activism, Meehan’s art practice intends to dismantle gender, the nuclear family, ‘nature’ as the basis of everything and explore the connection between personal experience and larger social and political structures.