ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the pursuit of individualism, authenticity, and meaning amid the contradictions of contemporary life. I create vibrant, playful, and stylish paintings. I pull from different visual sources and combine them to construct collage-like subjects. Figures emerge from estimation, incongruity, and nonsense. I delight in pattern and texture, use color to nuance darkness, and embrace varied perspectives.
I’m drawn to the gap between what we experience and how we understand it. My creative and intellectual interests are informed by cognitive psychology and mindfulness — how perception is shaped not just by what we see, but by how we think, what we value, and the stories we tell ourselves. I’m fascinated by the idea that reality is not fixed, but constructed.
I use playful invention as an existential strategy to mine the joy and ambivalence of queer life — where authority fractures, purpose is self-determined, and inconclusiveness is inevitable. The paintings embrace uncertainty as a generative condition, allowing approximate, substituted, amalgamated, and contradictory forms to cohere into meaning.
Cameron Meade earned his MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2018, after completing a B.A. in Psychology and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University in 2013. He briefly worked in computational biology before redirecting his focus to art. In 2025, his work was included in '40 Under 40,' a show juried by Jennie Goldstein, an Associate Curator of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has also been included in group exhibitions curated by Dexter Wimberly, Carmen Hermo, Ivy N. Jones, and Jesse Firestone and featured in Field Projects Gallery.' In 2019, he was a finalist for the William & Dorothy Yeck Young Painters Competition, juried by Barry Schwabsky, and was featured as a Rising Artist by WNET (PBS)’s ALL ARTS. He has attended residencies at Trestle, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, VCCA, Monson Arts, MASS MoCA, the Studios of Key West, and Kunstraum.
For the past 17 years, Cameron has worked for Starting Right, Now (SRN), a Tampa-based nonprofit founded by his mother, Vicki Sokolik. SRN serves homeless youth, removing barriers for them to cultivate long-term well-being and self-sufficiency. The organization is resolving structural inequities. Cameron’s art practice (and life) is inspired by this work, through which he has cultivated a large unconventional family and realized the immense value in intimate connections. Cameron was a collaborating writer on Vicki’s debut memoir, 'If You See Them: Young, Unhoused, and Alone in America,' about the systemic injustices that perpetuate generational poverty and homelessness, published in 2024. Yes, he wrote a book with his mom. Cameron lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
