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Mee Jey
Mee Jey is a multidisciplinary Indian artist concerned with lived experiences. Mee focuses on the collective politico-cultural identity and experiences, community engagement through her immersive installations, performances, relational art projects and time-based media. She is based out of St. Louis.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist concerned with the lived experience. Quotidian activities, quests and discoveries are fundamental to my art. My changing understanding of what it means to be an immigrant is accompanied by my newfound concerns of being a mother. It is thus no surprise that works deeply embedded in my cultural and personal experience are also politically charged.
My process is organic and evolutionary. I strategically design a larger structure within which there is scope for unplanned and accidental elements to be incorporated in the creative process. My decision to work with repurposed fabric and found material is driven by my economic and ecological concerns. I employ Indian visual lexicons and treatment techniques using material found or procured from my community. Using repetitiveness as a visual and formal tool in my works, I play on the power of repetitiveness itself. My production technique demands intense physical labour hence bear my patina in every aspect.
Along with this inter-weaving of political and personal subjects and Indian cultural knowledge with American material, I often engage with the tension between history and contemporary life. My several years of training as a historian and archaeologist have instilled in me a method of enquiry that connects current affairs to the oldest reference point in my knowledge. This contrasting of information and knowledge is then projected onto my current socio-political scenario to make sense of my time and space.
Through my artistic practice I initiate dialogue for social change. In addition to stimulating professional discourse around humanitarian issues within the art fraternity through my studio works, I also engage in multi-level strategic communication to initiate the change at functional level. I communicate with social welfare institutions, participants from different socio-cultural backgrounds and with my partner/collaborator artists in my community-based projects to bring forth changes that is believed to improve the social infrastructure.
