WASHINGTON, DC.- Irvine Contemporary presents new gallery artist Alexa Meade and her series of recent photographs during Picture Planes: Robert Mellor & Alexa Meade, June 19 – July 24. Last week, Meade continued her unique portrait series with Anne Goodyear, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Meade’s portraits are executed by painting directly on a subject’s body and clothing to render flattened three-dimensional figures in composed sets or staged in real world locations. Alexa Meade’s photographs are at once records of a performance, a portrait session, and a reflection on three- and two-dimensional representational spaces. Meade calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium: she presents not simply photography and painting as instances of two-dimensional picture planes, but transforms painted bodies and object