Shae Meyer was born in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, CO. He studied at the University of Colorado, where he received his BFA in Printmaking. He moved to New York City and began working in studios producing large scale paintings in the Hudson River style, while developing his own processes.
His childhood was spent alternating between a growing tech town and exploring the unique beauty of the mountains. This contrast inspired an acute interest color, form and material. Storms, sunsets, and wildfire ravaging the landscape came to contrast alleys, refuse, and oil in a fissure-filled sidewalk lending inspiration to his unique perspective of color, material, and func-tionality as his environment grew increasingly dissonant.
His work concerns objectivity, subjectivity, and individuality within the context of envi-ronment. Incorporating materials discarded and overlooked, he examines whether these have intrinsic value, or prescribed value based on their use. By pulverizing these materials they often lose their natural form, and become hidden in the depths of a painting, becoming a part of the larger whole, an element within a larger context. For Meyer, these materials become an allegory for the value of an individual person, examining if somebody is more than merely the sum of their parts, or perhaps; are all these parts the same. Using postindustrial materials in contrast with raw materials, he explores how these materials function within society, and for those using them. Wondering constantly whether he is a big part of something small, or a small part of something big, or perhaps nothing at all. The paintings reference phenomena which are ambiguously similar despite being drastically different scales.
It wasn’t until exploring the processes of printmaking that the power of material interac-tion became so central a theme to his work. Inspired by ferric chloride etching into copper, nitric acid on a lithographic stone, and how inks of differing viscosity interacted, he began to incorpo-rate these ideas in his paintings. Moving beyond inter-medium disciplines he sought to find new ways of making marks, on paper, canvas, copper, and stone.