Artwork | Tina Meister

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TINA ROSE REA MEISTER

interdisciplinary artist

experimental film | painting | social practice | textile & craft

My studio research blends multimedia artwork, social practice, and archives to trace queer relational dynamics, kinship, and world-making through the lens of domestic and ecological spaces.

SOCIAL PRACTICE

A picture of two floral patterned oven mitts with wear and burn marks. The oven mitts are mended and have beads covering where they were worn through. One oven mitt reads "I dream of protecting you always I dream you are safe" and the other reads "I dream of a world where you do not need protection"

Soft Places: Preserving the Lesbian Home Archive

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An image showing a different quilted collage of photos, some of fabric, others of a wedding, a childhood photo, a photo of a couple, a photo of trees. They all combine to a kaleidoscopic effect of color.

The Sum of Our Parts: Experimental Film Portraits

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My current artistic social practice is centered around recording the queer home archive, a piece often missing from a history that documents a public struggle for acceptance and human rights. My work seeks to respond to a question that has been ever under the surface in queer representation:

How do we capture, represent, and uplift experiences of the vulnerable self, while contending with a system that expects surveillance, over-exposure, and access to our most private interiors?

My studio investigations use fabric, quilting and mending as motifs for queer kinship, fragmentation of identity, and community. Using the medium of textiles and film, I investigate how we might uplift the fragmented self while drawing associations to the relational attachments of one’s personal and more broad community and sense of place. These practices center queer identity as communal, political, ecological, personal.

TEXTILES

A large, quilted tapestry with two women in a bathroom. The quilt is bright and colorful, and the patchwork and stitched lines are expressively rendered. The bathtub is running with glittering water made of a transparent fabric. The tiles are made from a large variety of patterns and colors. There is text on the quilt, that reads "But do not pity us too"

In addition to the textile components of my social practice, quilting, embroidering, and mending have become a key part of exploring the material culture of my own queer identity.

I create both images and works that touch on representation more abstractly—blankets, towels, and soft home objects reference the body without revealing it—coverage becomes a form of portraiture that does not ask for the presence of a body.

I am particularly interested in the intersection between text and textiles. The privacy of language—or, as Anne Carson describes, of "throwing oneself in the dark"—is the formal experience I seek to produce through the integration of text in my work.

A photo of an art gallery installation. A handmade quilt hangs on a wooden shelf that looks like it was taken out of a warm home. The quilt's fabric is a mix of hand-dyed cotton and photo-printed fabric that shows the texture of skin. Along the border of the quilt, there are pink triangles. The quilt has text that has been cut out by hand and sewn over the surface of the squares. The text reads "I would love someday for our love not to be a reminder of what is at stake"

The labor to put these statements on the surfaces of the textiles and their relative significance expose these limits between the self and other, but allow for the intimacy of a shared encounter through material means. In acknowledging the labor and bittersweet struggle of communicating, the formal processes of the text in my work place the viewer in a position to model care: laborious, intentional, without any distinct reward beyond a potential moment of seeing—an intimate clarity between oneself and another.

A photo of a gallery installation on a pink wall. A towel has been installed on a towel bar, with a bright, large mirror above it. The towel has been hand-embroidered with the text "refills prescriptions as frequently as possible". The text is rendered in a cursive handwriting, and the towel is neatly folded over the rack.

A photo of an ornate floral towel with embroidery. The embroidered text is written in long, flowing cursive that entangles with the floral pattern behind it. The towel has been hung on a clothesline for the photo, so that light shines through it and the colors of nature bleed around its edges

Film

My wife Josie and I make experimental films together. Josie has an expertise in new media and programming, while my background is primarily in analog materials. Our collaboration has led us to strange and playful approaches to film, in both the development and editing processes.

A still image taken from the experimental film. The film is structured like a quilt, with nine different videos playing at once. In the center is the subject of the portrait, and each of the film sections show a different aspect of her life.

A video thumbnail for the experimental film, "Under the Covers Girl". A woman stands in nature, her feet in the water by the sand and the forest. The woman's face and body have been overlayed with a fabric pattern, and faintly, a second frame can be seen showing another fabric and pattern where she will move. The two frames are overlayed, with one at a light opacity to show the process of the film.

The Sum of Our Parts | Film I
2025

Click to watch on Vimeo >

Under the Covers Girl
2024

Click to watch on Vimeo >

A painting of a hand pinching light, peachy skin. The paint is applied expressively to convey the figure with rich and warm colors. There is a floral pattern painted under the hand, and beneath the pattern, a paper has been collaged onto the surface. The paper is a prescription for Estradiol.

My painting and drawing practice explores the multiplicity of how we shape and define our biomes and our bodies, finding stability in change—

Two women embrace in an expressive room filled with plants, patterned surfaces, and expressive brushstrokes. There is text embedded into the painting that reads "lets go grocery shopping," "I'll kiss you in front of the zucchinis," "You'll laugh," "I'll bag the fruit," "I will hold you when we get home"

PAINTING

A rich green lake takes up most of the painting. The painting has an impressionist style, with thick brushstrokes rendering flowers and greenery. In the lake, two women are swimming with only their heads visible above the water. They are surrounded by water lilies and seem to be bathing together. On the far edge of the painting, the green lake is revealed to be a shower curtain, with a woman pulling it. Her hand covers part of the imaginary world, and she looks directly at the audience.

queerness offers a model of our ability to adapt, care, and love in the wake of rapidly changing climates.

Dreamy painted scenes interweave domestic interiors with lushious, overgrown utopias, expanding both inward and outward to encompass the natural world and the imagined interior self, while exposing the tensions between this dream and reality. In so contending with the current circumstances—surveillance, grief, exclusion—these ecologies and fantasy realms offer new paths forward to center queer joy without undermining or shying from the limitations and absences for where that joy can live and thrive.

A painting rendered in bold, expressive strokes. A woman is looking down at another woman, who seems to be taking care of something missing from the painting in the cat bed. Next to the bed, a pile of clothes and patterns blends into another version of the first woman, so that she looks down upon the figure looking upon her.

A painting of two women holding each other. The figures are abstract and expressive. There is a bold patterned fabric covering both figures, and a gentle fabric that folds toward them from the edge. A domestic space can be seen in the background through small cues, like a few marks to indicate a sink and a window. The figures have a forlorn expression, and one sits behind the other, with her hand wrapped over top in thick paint.

Claiming a world of our own in which tenderness and care drive and shape the material landscape, these scenes both assert queer senses of belonging and wellbeing in spite of these forces, and consider the fragility, and thus flexibility, of how the world might be shaped.

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