Utopian Slumps
25 Easey St, Collingwood, 3066, Victoria, Australia

Subscribe to Events RSS

Subscribe with iCal

Meggs' artwork reflects his background in graffiti art, illustration and design. Recognised for his stencils and aerosol art throughout the CBD and surrounding suburbs, Meggs has evolved his skills in painting, illustration and screen printing to explore his own unique style of character work from both wall to canvas. His work can be found predominantly around the streets of Melbourne, however has also travelled as far as London, Tokyo, Barcelona and Paris.

Meggs has contributed to numerous exhibitions such as Streetworks, May 2004 at Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne/Sydney Stencil Festival 2004/05/06, K-Swiss K-Spray Asia Tour, September 2005 and the No-Comply Festival at Federation Square 2007.

Some of Meggs' early stencil work was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Australia as part of their permanent street art collection. A profiled artist in the book Melbourne: Stencil Graffiti Capitol, his artwork has also featured in numerous magazines and online zines. Meggs is also a member of the renowned Everfresh Studio, a unique collective of artists whose work spans from street art, murals, exhibitions and commissioned design projects.

Everfresh Studio recently hosted Backwoods, their first ever group exhibition, and possibly Melbourne's biggest ever street-art studio show, with an opening night attendance of over two thousand people. Alter Egotism is a collection of works inspired by confused conscience, juvenile indulgence and self-destructive behavior.

The works combine expressive textures and colours with character art and pop-references to explore the fundamental duality of self and Meggs' particular fascination of the darker side of human nature. Meggs says;  "In particular my work celebrates the role of villains in pop-culture and takes a tongue-in-cheek perspective of normally taboo acts of indulgence, anger and desire. I have always been intrigued by the villain whose personalities, characteristics and costume were much more interesting and elaborate than their seemingly more moral counterparts."

Power, violence, lust, sex, humour, masculinity and death are dominant themes throughout Meggs' paintings which challenge nostalgic ideals of heroics and villainy in portraits and collages that reference Meggs' childhood influences of cartoons, comics and graffiti art. "The works attempt to challenge any simplistic notion of 'good vs evil' and express a personal struggle with my own, and others, moral judgments and social behaviors."