Age: 25 • Lives and creates: Lakewood • Learned: BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art
Story by Amanda Koehn
Nolan Meyer specializes in what he calls “loud, digital collages – but painting,” taking a classical artistic approach to themes inspired by pop culture and digital media.
Growing up in Lancaster County, Pa., a couple high school teachers noticed Meyer’s artistic abilities and pushed him to pursue art, he recalls. He participated in the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Pre-College program and remembers quickly appreciating the not too big, not too small nature of Cleveland.
“I just was like, ‘yeah, this is for me’ – that was a pretty big motivator,” he tells Canvas about deciding to go to CIA.
Meyer says he has long been drawn to classic realist painters like Caravaggio, but art school opened his worldview to more modernist styles. He also took digital video and photography classes, which influenced his interests in terms of subject matter, although he stuck to painting as his medium of choice, he says.
“With painting, it kind of feels like you have to fight with it or kind of accept sometimes that it has a mind of its own,” he says.
Drawing inspiration from music, the internet and video games, his paintings tend to capture pop culture moments. They often have distorted aspects and amusing, eerie details that draw you in. Viewing his work, you’ll likely see at least one cultural reference that’s familiar, but vastly different from how you’ve previously experienced it.
Meyer’s process typically begins with an online image or meme, and then he drafts his design in Photoshop. He sketches and paints his piece from there, he says.
His overarching artistic philosophy tends to address how humans have communicated visually across time, “drawing that through line from an older painter like Caravaggio, and then also the guy with a funny name with a bunch of numbers in it on Instagram.” Ideas about politics, news and culture today are often accessed through online imagery, like infographics or memes, whereas historically, creators would comment on those subjects through mediums like painting.
“They’re doing a very similar thing just in a very different way, where they’re using imagery to communicate an idea,” he says.
For his Bachelor of Fine Arts project, Meyer initially struggled with explaining to his professors how modern video game visual elements fit into his artwork, showing up as “naturalist images that had these weird distortions that only happened in a video game,” he says. Then, he had to shift his BFA show online due to COVID-19. He coded his own video game “gallery” to exhibit his paintings.
“It was cool because it accidentally solved the problem because all the professors were able to experience the sort of glitch that I was using,” he says. “… They could see (the distortions) happening in real time and then understand it and then make that connection. So, it solved the issue of what I was trying to figure out the entire time at CIA. … It was like take a screenshot of a game, paint that, take a picture of the painting and then put it in another video game.”
Since graduating from CIA in 2020, Meyer says he’s been challenged by the social aspect of an artist’s life. Working as a line cook – a job that can include evenings and odd hours – it can be difficult to balance things like attending gallery openings, networking, making money and creating new artwork.
However, one major opportunity Meyer received toward that end was serving as the inaugural artist in residence with feverdream – a new artists’ residency and community program headquartered in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood. Since launching in 2022, feverdream aims to provide opportunities to local early-career artists who want to better develop their practice. For it, Meyer received funding and work space to make artwork – which included a mysterious 38-foot mural depicting a bright red squid imposed on a lighthouse. It was displayed on The Shoreway building on West 76th Street in Cleveland’s Battery Park earlier this year.
After his residency, Meyer was in a show with two feverdream artists in residence who succeeded him, Elizabeth Lax and Sakurako Reed, which was on view at feverdream this summer. He also recently received the Artists Forward Fund, a microgrant for his work that’s supported by the Cleveland Foundation and administered by SPACES. Lately, he’s mainly been working on improving his output of artwork and working toward another group show, he says.
“I just like that I’m interacting with a lot of really talented young people,” he says, adding that as COVID-19 fades from the forefront, he’s noticing artists in the community creating and showing more new work – a welcome shift.
See more at @nobrainmycar.
“Meyer puts contemporary media under a microscope to pick apart its complexities, provocations and cultural consequences. His work is an amalgamation of his experience of contemporary life through the lenses of social media, video games and internet culture. It reflects social ailments born of the anonymity of — and cultivated in the alienation of — being online, and it delivers a mysterious and ambiguous vision of reality drenched in the bleakness of speculative science fiction. His ability to manipulate images and proficiency with paint invites viewers into this very personal and cerebral space.”
Mike Meier, assistant professor of painting, the Cleveland Institute of Art
