BasketShop presents Again I Put All My Hope In Dirt and Wood, new paintings by Megan Bickel. The artist draws upon the historical power dynamics of illusionary space created in the painted image and how it responds to current trends of propaganda and misinformation. Recognizable gestures of traditional painting are grounded by digitally printed technologies with materials such as inkjet-prints and holographic textiles as a demonstration of how those ideas affect our lived experience in a Capitalist world. One that relies on our consumption, interaction, and monetization of images. The paintings give a first impression of something organically nurtured on the surface and then contradicts itself to expose less humanizing materials constructed by industrialized patterns meant to facismilate visual phenomenon by computer generated effects.

With these paintings, the viewer is set up to ponder their current understanding of reality: is a mass produced textile any more “holographic” than the perspective of a Renaissance mural? How is “space’ defined by a flat, printed image? We are conditioned to rely on the allusory branded product that is advertised to us and mislead from our own imagination through a vortex of algorithms and information mining. Bickel’s paintings display her willingness to take that ride and return to the material world again and again.

Megan Bickel is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based out of Louisville, Kentucky. Bickel is currently working toward her Master of Arts in Digital Studies in Language, Culture, and History at the University of Chicago. She received her MFA from the University of Louisville (2021) and received her BFA/BA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 2012. She has since then been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and abroad; most notably at KMAC, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Quappi Projects, University of Cincinnati, Georgetown College, and Fitzrovia Gallery in London, UK.. Bickel has additionally curated / organized exhibitions, and had writings published nationally. She is the the Founder and Organizer for houseguest, an independent, non-commercial, artist-run incubator and project space. Bickel has been published in SECAC’s Review Journal: Art Inquiries, Ginger, and Action / Spectacle, and is a regular contributor to Aeqai and Ruckus. She was a participant in Burnaway’s Arts Writing Incubator in 2021 and will be presenting several papers on Research and Visual Evidence at the University of Chicago.