“In preparation for her newest body of work, The Giants, Meigs sat inconspicuously in a corner of the Inner Harbour in Victoria, B.C. for two consecutive summers to observe the scores of tourists that pass through it on a daily basis. As they strolled, snacked, pointed, and snapped photos, Meigs drew character studies of these leisure bodies, and later, enlarged and transposed her cartoons onto panels using watercolours in a soft palette of yellows and greys. Each portrait is assembled from a number of tacked-on components: Fabric dyed in similar colours become idiosyncratic fashions of these boardwalk denizens; and painted glass spheres capture their bug-eyed stares underneath flip-up sunglasses and broad-rimmed hats. Their titles, floating in the background behind their heads, suggest their preoccupying primal thoughts: buy, eat, look, nap.

Once completed, each “combine” painting was photographed using a 4x5 Leica, digitally printed on Hahnemuhle paper using pigment inks at close to life-size, and then cut out again. In each work, Meigs has excised the “dead space” behind her constructions to create cutouts that deviate from the conventional square format of photographs (and painting for that matter). While each print successfully flattens her forms, their taut shapes return them to objects once again. As Meigs writes, “They still have the ephemeral quality I was going for. Some of the cuts take on their own logic that doesn’t match the outline of the form, which I like. When tacked to the wall, the new shadows created by the paper shapes also creates a new logic in the work.””