Megan Bickel (Louisville, KY) is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of painting, new media, and data analysis. Bickel recently received her Master of Arts in Digital Studies in Language, Culture, and History at the University of Chicago where her research related solastalgia into an adjacent aesthetic term—-digital solastalgia—and subsequently related it to the future of climate storytelling evidenced through an exploratory study of Google Vision API and the label production for images depicting the climate crisis.
She received her MFA from the University of Louisville (2021) and has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most notably at KMAC, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Quappi Projects, the University of Cincinnati, and Georgetown College. Bickel has additionally had arts criticism and science fiction published nationally.
Last, she is the founder & organizer for houseguest, an artist-run incubator that holds five-six exhibitions a year exploring topics that interrogate the zeitgeist out of her home in Louisville, Kentucky.

Statement

Topics that most influence me are those which confront us in the intertwined spectacle of journalism, political science, advertising, and propaganda. Oscillating between painting and using the semiotics of Casualist and Post-Digital Painting, I interact with paint, textile, digital media, installation, and film. At times appearing indecisive, I use abstraction and joy to offer the audience a summated opportunity to consider misinformation, or misdirected information, specifically in the Digital Age.
In addition to painting, I interrogate the consumption of visual data: how visual evidence is communicated to the public, the probability of factual 'truths,' and cultivating safe, imaginative spaces for the viewer to conceive of ethically superior realities. One way I do this is through an appropriation of scientific methodologies. This appropriation appears as large-scale studies of images using deep learning in order to investigate the narrative of the climate crisis and how it will be told for the next century; or spherifying watercolor paint in order to de-commodify painting, by making it disappear.