Matéa Lake LeBeau is a multidisciplinary artist and handpoke tattooist based in Brooklyn and Ithaca, NY.
Matéa has been handpoking since 2018, and now co-owns and operates Show Pony Studio – an emerging artists’ space, gallery, and private tattoo studio in downtown Ithaca, NY. She is also a resident at Giftshop Tattoo Collective in Brooklyn, NY. Tattooing has become her favorite way of staying present and creating meaning with others. Let her know if you want a tattoo, she’d love to give you one!
Matéa was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, and received her BFA from Cornell University in 2022. In the past she has utilized a variety of media (printmaking, sculpture, animation/video, drawing, photography, performance, paper making, and painting) to examine themes of presence, impermanence, and the act of deliberate slowness across artistic disciplines.
When not tattooing or drawing, Matéa can be found moonlighting as #71 Joni Bitchell, skating for Goth Roller Derby’s Brooklyn Bombshells.
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What do we deem important enough to make permanent? What is permanent within us? What is the meaning of permanence in a time of such great instability, erasure, and destruction? I hope to spark meditations on these ideas - both in others and within myself - through material play across artistic disciplines. I have found that the creation of a tattoo can bring about tender, vulnerable, and decisive moments of exchange between people. It is the slow and devotional process of the hand poked tattoo that keeps me present. As a result, the preciousness of human connecteness becomes emboldened, and its necessity ever more tangible, even in the most uncertain and precarious of times.
email matea.lebeau@gmail.com for further inquiries.
email wilsonistheworst@gmail.com for further tattoo inquiries.