Rising Stars: Meet Megan Matthews

Today we’d like to introduce you to Megan Matthews. 

Hi Megan, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve always been labeled as a “creative type” from a young age, gravitating towards art class, musical performance, creative writing, and constant doodling. This has stuck with me throughout my teenage and well into my adult life. My passion for both music and visual arts drove me toward the concert industry which in turn opened my mind to large-scale immersive installation art. This is the heart of where my passion lies, exploring the possibilities that can be fostered through the unbounded combining of tradition and digital media, engineering, architecture, UI design, and nature. At my core, I am driven by the intense desire to create wonder-inducing, potentially educational spaces, and experiences that any average human can walk up to and immerse themselves in. 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely has not always been a smooth road, but each twist and turn of my journey has helped prepare me for the next steps I end up taking. Leaving my home state of Colorado to go to an art college in Savannah challenged me and helped me learn what I really valued as a young adult out on my own. Making the decision to leave SCAD to finish my degree at CU Boulder helped me refine my scope as well as pick up programming and more environmental-based forms of digital art. Adjusting to life in Colorado with its many ups and downs, especially the vast and still somehow close-knit Denver Art scene has both given me an unprecedented feeling of community and support as well as taught me to set proper boundaries and be a working professional. Learning Touch Designer hand in hand with my programming in school has springboarded me into an incredible career path that I feel very excited to continue to develop upon. 

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am extremely passionate about my work! I have very deep desire to create art that transcends aesthetics and the social/nightlife scene and instead create large-scale installation work or interactive creative projects that combine the aesthetics and knowledge of nature, herbalism, and organic systems with fun and wonder-inducing puzzles, games, devices, or public art displays. I am currently working towards this goal as I continue to also grow in the music and digital art industry here in Denver. I run visuals for shows at a wide range of venues as well as travel and do both visual sets and installations at festivals. Currently, I am most proud of my pieces that include plant media such as the mapping of the Clocktower in downtown Denver and my senior capstone which was a device to scan seed packets into a touch-interactive system that could then educate the audience about the seeds and plants that come from them. I believe what sets me apart from others is my deep-rooted (haha) desire to find ways to take technology and use it to re-integrate us as a society back into the natural systems of the world and improve our lives in a sustainable way. I’m known by many of my friends for these themes and ideas in my art which I usually label under the umbrella term, “SolarPunk”. 

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
One of my favorite childhood memories is the times I spent climbing all of the seemingly gargantuan pine trees in my mountain-nestled neighborhood. I would typically do this while listening to music and imagining fantastical and magical scenarios occurring around me based off of the music while I tried to scale to the very top. Nature and listening to music have always been really important outlets for me as someone who regularly and often can experience over-stimulation in social settings. I also experience certain forms of synesthesia and used music to direct this experience into ideas that I would then later use in my art. Trees have always given me such a huge sense of security and climbing them made me feel very much at home. 

Pricing:

• Day rate for programming: $500/day
• Hourly rate for programming: $65/hr

Contact Info:

• Email: megan3matthews@gmail.com
• Instagram: Mega.Pixel.Art
• Facebook: Mega.pixel Art