Meg Griffiths
Meg Griffiths was born in Indiana and raised in Texas. She received Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Texas in Cultural Anthropology and English Literature and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has traveled nationally and internationally and can be found in various collections such as Center for Creative Photography, Capitol One Collection, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her book projects, both monographs as well as collaborative, have been acquired by various institutions around the country such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Duke University Libraries, Museum of Modern Art, University of Virginia, University of Iowa, Clemson, Maryland Institute College of Art, Ringling College of Art, and Washington and Lee University, to name a few. She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is the Assistant Professor of Photography in the Division of Visual Arts at Texas Woman's University.
Artist Statement
These two images are from a larger body of work entitled Somewhere within and without, they are my attempt to deconstruct the ways I engage with memory, perception and time. Harnessing light and material I carefully construct quiet still lives to subtly direct the gaze both inward and then out again. The body of work reflects a culmination of curiosities, the expression of my interiority, a subjective perspective, and a more objective standpoint that the universe is simply mysterious and happening. The images oscillate between these two ways of being and are expressed in two ways of seeing, trying to create a sense of simultaneity. Each piece becomes a synthesis of my internal and external encounters. Everyday household objects are gathered and arranged, briefly grounding the self in the familiar and the domestic. In tandem, an alchemy occurs within the image, and materials become untethered from convention and association, creating space for new meanings within meanings.
Release Date: June 24, 2022
This image is an extension and a remnant. It is about a languishing. A prolonging of the time that we think of as now. A deep sense of mourning. A feeling of longing. It’s about the beauty that’s inherent. The potency of the living. The collective unforgiving. It reveals to me the delicacy and uncertainty of events that make up my one precious life, that make up many. Like a poem. This image is a moment. Distilled into crystalline form, elegantly fixed, completely fragile, ephemeral.
Extended Present, 2021
For A Brief Moment, 2021
Release Date: November 18, 2022
We are finite in the infinite. I am an event on the planet. You are an event too. As much as a rock, a flower or a tear in a cushion. We all swim and swirl in a sea of events. The inception of each and the duration of all are unique unto themselves. I think what I was trying to convey in this one image is this difference in time, how it is perceived and how it just is. How they all overlap and coexist for a brief moment.
My father, a geologist, would talk about this layering of time in the sediment as a child when we would travel around the country on camping trips. How we could see all around us a history of the earth and how it was formed. That when you look you can see it speaks a story of deeper time. And the events that happened just the right way to make the rock I would pick up and hold in my hand as a six-year-old and say “what is this one?” His response inevitably, “it’s not just one thing, it’s made up of many.” And then would tell the story of the rock.
The body is of course different, but in a way speaks to something similar. The chance event of inception, the specific factors it takes to form that human frame, that person who is encased inside. It too is a mark of time, and pressure and circumstance, a culmination of many things. And then I think about the time that it takes for that same body to wear a tear into a cushion. The cushion and the tear remaining long after the body is gone. The plucked flower a child gives a mother, or a lover gives to their other. Seemingly the most ephemeral of the expressions of time is the flower, the sentiment lasting ever longer. And the exquisiteness and indifference of it all.