Statement.
My studio practice is a response to how our relationship to intimacy and sexuality has changed with the presence of digital devices and spaces. The way images circulate on social media has disrupted the connection to our bodies and to one another. I am particularly interested in consent and agency in a digital age and society’s desensitization to sexual violence. This work is about finding space for sexual desire and intimacy after sexual trauma. Declaring affinity for your own body and pleasure is an act of catharsis. Fragmented and abstract bodies/devices (plants, sex toys, phones, and intimate clothing) are tools to explore the body and act as proxies for negotiations of intimacy which are ways we can acquire agency. Phones become surrogate eyes to view our bodies with and become an extension of our identities. This work is made up of non-linear allegories of queer-femme sexuality and the construction of a fantasy cyborg in contemporary digital society and is a visual reorientation of a tenderness to exist with emotional and physical autonomy.

In 2020, I started to create make-up art under the name sluttycaboodle. I view this as an extension my fine art practice and am developing a new narrative dissecting my tumultuous relationship to the digital space (social media, online shopping), creativity, consumerism and beauty.

Biography.
Megan Elaine Wirick is a queer fine artist living and working in Pennsylvania. Wirick obtained her BFA in Fine Art from Pennsylvania College of Art & Design in Lancaster, PA in 2016. In 2019, Wirick graduated with her MFA in Fine Arts at The School of Visual Arts in NYC. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions regionally, such as Whore Haus, Brooklyn, NY, which was presented by Stigma Unbound Sex Workers’ art collective, Femmexplicit Digitalia, Brooklyn, NY, Talented, Brilliant, Incredible…, New York, NY an exhibition featuring all queer artists and SHIFT: a queer/femme Exhibition about life after lock down, Brooklyn, NY and Lancaster, PA. Wirick has been featured in several independent publications including Interviews in Affection Magazine and Saturdaze Magazine and a contributing artist in Past Lives printed by Risolve Studio, Lancaster, PA; Issue 15 of Moody Zine, Milwaukee, WI; and Cooties Zine, Brooklyn, NY .