BIO
Founded in Scranton Pennsylvania, yet cultivated as a military brat, Megan Lavelle’s work utilizes structures of theater and psychoanalysis to approach, often with humor, the dynamics of doctrine and capital. She is at times a designer, a photographer, a curator, and a writer and is currently pursuing her MFA in Social Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California.
CONTACT: lavelle.m@gmail.com
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Artist Statement (of the moment)
Megan Lavelle’s work oscillates between the micro (the individual) and the macro (the public / collective) as a means to meet various understandings, perspectives, and implications of power with a variety of forms. Within this process, her past as a branding strategist turns a critical eye toward the practice of branding as a standardized, visual language imbued onto collective perception. A dissection of insurance is rooted in an interest to understand the power and psychology of suggestion, specifically as it relates to collective fear and risk. The form of the podium, as an architectural device, is studied to understand limitations and permissions of individual agency. Grounding her work in bureaucratic and corporate systems allows an investigation of a very complex humanity behind a facade of capital interest. Her most current work is an investigation of risk from varying perspectives. Stunt performance and actuarial info-graphics are brought into the studio as somatic and psychological units of measure within a behavioral economy of risk. The fiction in the work becomes a mirror for the audience, just as advertising and branding are a mirror for the consumer as elements of mass communication, performance, theater, bureaucracy, and standards of corporate language coalesce together to discuss scripted culture and the roles we assign ourselves within them as consumers, citizens, laborers, and lovers.
