In the article “Dust Breeding”, based on Marcel Duchamp’s work from 1920, Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Our reality has become experimental. Without destiny, modern man is left with an endless experimentation of himself.” He continues with a quotation from Walter Benjamin, “While humanity was once according to Homer an object of contemplation for the Gods, it has now become a contemplation of itself. Its own alienation has reached such a degree that humanity’s own destruction becomes a first rate aesthetic sensation.”

Fracture, disintegration, search, loss, change, tearing and decay can be seen in Meira’s work, but more than all that one sees the battle between despair and hope. This is a battle with no winners. This is sculptural evidence of its existence. This is her monument to the moment when information, transformation, catastrophe and speculation cause us to see in the sculpture, as in the human figure, the difficulties of man, his contemporary representation, his indecision and nakedness.

In Meira’s sculptures, paper reflects the want of material, but the intensity of existence; the temporariness of information, but the eternity of the spirit; the disintegration of existence, versus the continuity of creation.

In her work with newspaper, in which the information has become obsolete before it is printed, whose energy is related to the past, and the essence of its contents is the frustration of today, paper is used as a raw material for creation. Shape and appearance convey the feelings, thoughts, ideas and the existence of the individual in moments of conflict. The aesthetics, which are created and enhanced by the expressivity, colorfulness and compression of the material,  lead to the paradox between beauty and pain, between creation and destruction, between strength and weakness, between existence and loss, between the physical and the spiritual, between certainty and doubt.

Looking into what is and is not in Meira’s sculptures reveals the paradoxical relationship between them. The statement is of reduction, of nomadism, of erasure, of loss, and deconstruction; yet, despite the act of tearing, the sculpture is solid, in spite of the roughness, the sculpture is tactile, despite its aggression, the sculpture is aesthetic, and despite its lack, the sculpture is whole. This is an image of man sculpted in temporary material to create an allegory of our existence and of penetration into our being.
This creation is reflected in the lump of paper that is turned into a figure, into a statue, into substance, into meaning, and which allows the viewer to look into it and into himself.

Benedito Croce asks, “What is art?” – And says, “Art is the appearance or intuition. The artist creates a character or imaginative play, and the man who enjoys the artistic creation turns his eyes to the point that the artist indicated, looking through the porthole the artist opened for him, and recreates in it, the same character.”

 This is the essence of Art, the essence of Meira’s sculptures and the essence of being. From the point where the sculptress has finished her work and exhibited her sculptures, there begins the point where we, the viewersbegin our journey through the labyrinth that stands alive in its message, torn in its form, and standing still in its presence and power.

 Ruben Kohn, Curator