Meg Cranston has a broad artistic practice which includes painting, sculpture, performance, and video, writing and lecturing along with curatorial projects. Cranston has an ongoing interest in themes of personal identity, the subjective and its relationship to the broader culture by way of color theory, design, art history, shared cultural references, and formal experimentation. Cranston’s work is characterized by its playfulness and wit, an entrance into her explorations into the nature of image making and the role the artist plays in our society.

The varied and idiosyncratic paintings presented at Untitled Art Miami Beach examine the relationship between the written word, specifically poetry, and the painted image, while fusing the artist’s interest in color theory and art historical precedents. Each painting has a poem written by Cranston inscribed on the reverse. The six new paintings will be shown in the Artist Spotlight section guest curated by artist Petra Cortright.

The new work merges painting and writing into a unified form. Though she has long worked in both media, Cranston now treats them as parallel systems, two kinds of syntax. In her practice, visual structures such as composition, proportion, and color harmony function like grammar: a gesture acts as a verb; a palette sets a tone; spatial relationships articulate meaning as directly as sentences.

This approach is clear in Position, 2025 a “preposition painting” inspired by a paragraph by writer Grace Paley composed entirely of prepositional words. Cranston translates that linguistic structure into blocks of color arranged by relation:  beside, under, toward, across. The poem on the back begins:

above / across / after / against / among / around

affirming that both color and language express relationships.

In Split Complement, 2025 she uses the color harmony of one hue paired with the two flanking its opposite to explore interpersonal and philosophical relationships. On the verso, she imagines a short play generated by the painting’s chromatic logic:

Setting: Two flowers and a hot-dog boat in triadic harmony.
Dramatic Question: Has the conflict already happened, or is it about to?

The text proposes that harmony is dynamic rather than fixed.

A similar tension appears in Socialism, 2025 where two phones face each other, reflecting and transmitting imperfectly. The verso text considers how shared systems, political, emotional, or technological, rely on reciprocal attention. Its poem reads:

hey / hey / what? / nothing / tell me

Cranston places all texts on the back of the paintings so they function not as wall labels, but as the paintings’ own internal literature. To encounter the writing, the viewer must change position, physically or imaginatively, mirroring the work’s movement between interior and exterior, surface and meaning. Together, image and text form a single hybrid work: public on the front, private on the back, unified through tension and resonance.

Booth B25

Click on the link opposite for the Preview PDF of the booth.