NYAB Event - Meg Hitchcock “Verbatim”

Meg Hitchcock “Verbatim”

Studio 10

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Studio10 presents Meg Hitchcock “Verbatim.” In her labor-intensive work Hitchcock cuts individual letters from holy books and reconfigures them to create the text from another religion. Letters from these texts shed their rigid meanings and gain a more physical presence as they are reformed like sand into shapes reminiscent of waves, mandalas, or architectural adornments of a time past. The works encapsulate a slow quiet rigor both provocative and beautiful.

In her new series Verbatim at Studio10, she focuses on the relationship between the Bible and the Koran. The Lord’s Prayer is composed out of letters cut from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an Islamic prayer is created with letters cut from the Bible and a sunburst mandala is formed out of the names of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with letters cut from the Koran. In Credo, the Nicene Creed is made of letters cut from the Upanishads, the Hindu holy book. The letters form a cathedral-like mandala at the center of which is the insistence that “All is Brahman”. In her triptych “The Women”, Hitchcock creates three niqabs or Muslim headscarves out of definitive feminist writings.
For Hitchcock, the creative act is a form of meditation as well as a process of self-inquiry. By deconstructing sacred texts and emphasizing their interrelationships she disputes long-held claims of religious exclusivity, opening them to a more inclusive interpretation. Her work with sacred texts is a celebration of the diverse experiences of spirituality and the universal need for connection with something greater than oneself.

Meg Hitchcock is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with sacred texts is a culmination of her lifelong interest in religion, literature, and psychology. Hitchcock’s work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Berlin, and reviewed in Art in America, ArtCritical, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and The Daily Beast.