Strange Stranger

Maria Meyer is a current MFA student at the University of Hertfordshire. Her work explores the role of subjectivity and the way objects are perceived. She is interested in the way meaning, value and emotional potential are imbued by the viewer. Meyer’s practice involves sifting through online/self-created images and found objects, to then place them together, activating their potential to ‘speak’. Through the manipulation, deconstruction and juxtaposition of these found photographs and objects, her work creates new and often ambiguous narratives, leaving the viewer to ascribe their own meaning.

Her two-dimensional work has a layered digital aesthetic, imparted by the use of photoshop, leaving clearly visible interventions, in contrast to the usual image manipulation ubiquitous in advertising, that aims to conceal and enhance. This idea of what is hidden in images and objects is a constant theme in Meyer’s work. The hidden meanings, stories and histories of the often mundane things that surround us.

The title of the show is taken from philosopher Timothy Morton’s book ‘The Ecological Thought’*. In the book Morton refers to life forms on Earth being ‘strange strangers’, that we are inextricably entangled with. Meyer looks upon objects in the same way, often the more we ‘look’ at objects the more strange they become and our relationships with them even stranger.