Mish Meijers, Boardwalks, Billboards and By-elections, 2022. Oil on reverse acrylic (Hinterglasmalerei) mixed media on paper, framed, 103 x 133.cm. Courtesy: the artist and Bett Gallery, Hobart.

Bett Gallery presents a solo exhibition featuring the works of Mish Meijers.

Meijers makes new worlds out of old, and sometimes virtual ones. In the hybrid paintings from her new body of work Low to No Filter, we see remnants of pre-covid travel merging with almost-memories from the concurrent stream of virtual life which flows thickly from our devices. An endless flow of information, collectively not-experienced, but universally known.

Meijers works with both found and made imagery without prioritising either. The outcome is an assemblage of thick paint and photography pressed up against the glass, as if looking back at you, as if wondering how much you’ve noticed, what you’ve paid attention to. They are not passive images, they are a conversation, two-sided and insistent on reciprocation. Her ceramics are just as direct. Populations swarming their hosts, worlds building on worlds, building on worlds.

The exhibition itself is also a kind of remnant. Meijers has recontextualised artefacts and materials from her recent installation Sprinting towards the Sun to provide a framework for these new paintings and ceramics. Sprinting towards the Sun was neither fight nor flight, but freeze in the face of unsustainable options. A contemplation on our compulsion to contribute our everything to the data bank, with an awareness of this engulfing mass which threatens to become infinite.

Low to No Filter has Meijers stealing our lives back from the databank and compressing them into her imagery. A kind of information offsetting for future generations. Space-making, in the face of the relentless exponential.

— Tricky Walsh, 2022

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