Details important to Jaque Meng
Jaque Meng is motivated to create.
She has taken her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Eastern Washington University and run, making contacts and ensuring that her creative passions have an outlet. Her Web site is up and her portfolio is filling up fast with exhibits and public art commissions.
Meng, 25, is proactive. She submits proposals to advertised “call for artists.”
“It’s a long process, and there will be rejections,” she said, “but if you make good contacts and keep researching, things will happen,” she said.
This month, she will be hitching up the camper and traveling to Santa Clarita, Calif., for her first public art installation.
After that, she will continue to seek out “site specific” places where her art will fit nicely. “I like to create work for a specific location rather than find a place for something that’s already been created.”
Meng works in a host of mediums. She uses a pallet knife with acrylic paints, clay, video and words. “I started writing stories when I could pick up a pencil,” she said, “but I really like the physical contact with the work. Still, any type of art is a form of communication.”
Her video work is just an extension of her desire to move a viewer with images and include visually stunning clips of the world. “I really want to capture feelings from around the world.”
Her style is contemporary-formal. Texture, shape and color organically flow and add warmth to her art’s environments. In the entryway to her Spokane Valley home, ceramic slips formed into earth-toned rounded and stretched shapes blend together and are fastened to the wall; they appear to have grown there, naturally and randomly placed.
Meng grew up in Spokane and though she was always “in touch” with her artistic side, she tried her hand at golf, even playing at a college level. “I chose art over pro golf.”
She now spends her time really looking at things. “I think that I find the details in life to be what I observe most, a blade of grass, someone’s hand, a pitch, or sound, a pulse and how it feels.” She is also intrigued by how “everything is connected in some way.”
Her Web site states that “the details of life seem to be left out or forgotten by most, and she naturally brings those details of life into her work, whether it’s sculpture, painting or video.” In her personal writings, she describes her video work as “a medium to show a poetic universe that’s imbedded and formulated on a screen … it will cause some type of mental reaction, which is most important. That’s what life is, compressed thoughts that may go unrecognized until someone releases an energy to help someone capture a formal feel, no matter how small or large.”
In all of her endeavors, Meng hopes to capture a feeling. She also plans to assist other artists in the public art forum.
“I’ve been given great opportunity through contacts I’ve made, and I want to share that with others. I want to give artists hope and an outlet to be creative.”