Meg Cranston works with the conventions of painting, yet with a conceptual approach. She is part of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who rallied against abstraction and conceptual art’s reductivism, and reconnecting it to the broader visual culture. While returning to images, painting and traditional media, however, Cranston’s work is equally informed by the legacies of modern art and its disappointments.

The Myth of Symmetry might be read as a comment on both gestalt in art and notions of beauty in human faces. These principles that both exalt symmetry are somewhat bastardized by Cranston’s collage and painting technique where shapes and forms, photographs and painting echo each other, but not perfectly. Like much of Cranston’s work from the mid-2000s, this work has a belligerence towards consumer culture that is also aligned with standardized beauty, critically engaging in both art history and advertising with a feminist slant.