Meghann Gilligan-Koehn

Dream City. Hot Deals.

This series of photographs and prints is an exploration of the Used Car Lot as a revelatory site, a place where the iconic promise of American Dream Capitalism starts to fray at the edges and reveal a precarious and predatory operation. Neon signs and salesmen promise hot deals and easy financing, but often end up selling people lemons and leaving buyers with a high interest loans of 25% or more. Each year over 2 million vehicles are repossessed. The ‘repo men’ are everywhere, moving with their laptops and high-speed cameras to spot and identify the thousands of cars scheduled every day for repossession after 90 days of loan defaulting.

Capitalism couldn't exist without the powerful mythologies and propaganda that prop it up. Messaging like “You can make it, if you work hard enough” and “Good things happen to good people”, tropes often seen employed in marketing used cars, are central to keeping people buying into capitalism, even when it’s not actually working for them. Any failures of capitalism are then blamed on individuals, while obscuring the larger systems that make financial success and stability possible for a small few, but an unattainable dream for the majority.

We are all pawns in late-stage capitalism.

This series of photographs focuses on pawn shops. Guns and gold. The pawn shop provides small loans at high interest rates in exchange for collateral such as jewelry, guns, electronics, musical instruments, or anything else that is judged to have a resale value. Pawn shops keep the collateral, and if the loan is repaid, the item is returned. If the money isn’t repaid, the item is sold and the pawn shop keeps the proceeds. Typically pawn shops lend money to people at a lower economic level who don’t have access to other forms of credit, such as credit cards or a credit line from a bank.

Inequality is breeding more inequality. From fast food workers and school bus drivers to caregivers and housecleaners, more people are slipping into poverty, unable to afford housing or pay their bills, let alone build savings and get ahead. Despite the propaganda of American capitalist exceptionalism, the reality is that the rich are getting richer and everyone else is left with very limited choices in figuring out how to get by.

This self-portrait, created while I was pregnant with my first child, is composed of three photographic images. Each image is screen-printed onto a reclaimed vintage bedsheet, framed by frayed edges. I made this piece in response to the shift in others’ perception of my identity while I was pregnant and in the early days of new motherhood. It seemed that I, a human being in the world with my own interests and agency, was being disappeared into the monolithic stereotype of “Mother”.

This progression of the silhouette images in this piece mirror this disorienting experience, with the belly becoming increasingly prominent, while the face disappears into the floral textile background.

Screenprint on textile, 48”x60”

Tintypes are handmade photographic images exposed directly onto aluminum plates using large-format 4x5 and 8x10 cameras. Images are made using one of the earliest photographic processes, wet-plate collodion, which dates back to the 1850s. The tintype process is both extremely meticulous and extremely unpredictable, which has led me to make some extraordinary images, and has also led me to frustrating days of failed image after failed image. With wet-plate collodion tintypes, the beauty is often in the ‘flaws’ that result from combustible combinations of light, heat and a dynamic photographic emulsion.

I began the traveling tintype project in 2011, with a DIY conversion of a vintage travel trailer into a mobile wet-plate collodion tintype darkroom. With this darkroom in tow, I’ve travelled around the Pacific Northwest, making tintypes of the compelling people, places and things I encounter and sharing this unique process with communities along the way through demonstrations and workshops.

This series of sculptural works combines foraged organic materials with precious metals, copper and bronze, utilizing the casting and electroform processes. Bringing these materials together is a way to highlight and honor the beauty in what is often overlooked and unvalued.

The act of noticing, of slowing down, of really looking at the incredible natural world all around us, can open up paths to experience small sparks of wonder and delight. These everyday revelations can act as a reminder that we are deeply connected to everything around us and need to center care in our interactions, and we must honor and protect this earth that is our home.

Large-scale multi-media sculpture. For me, this piece is an exploration of the psychological, emotional and physical boundaries that have been erected to separate the realms of “nature” and “culture”. The reactions produced at the sites where these invisible borders are overwhelmed or transgressed are fascinating: beauty, wonder, terror, absurdity, and the sublime.

“Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other entity or animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term flocking or murmuration can refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, herding to refer to swarm behaviour in tetrapods, and shoaling or schooling to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called blooms, although these organisms are algae and are not self-propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term "swarm" is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars.” {Swarm behavior, wikipedia}

A large-scale multimedia sculpture, made in response to the perceived “too-much-ness” of female/femme bodies and ways of being in the world.

In mainstream puritanical western culture, bodies and bodily desires are often categorized as too unruly, too uncontrolled, too much.

Oozing and sparkling, with mouths and tongues and flowers and fingers all intertwined, this sculpture is a celebration of too-much-ness, an honoring of the refusal to be controlled, to be toned-down and made to behave.