Matéa Lake LeBeau is a multidisciplinary artist and handpoke tattooist based in Brooklyn and Ithaca, NY.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Matéa 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.
These days, Matéa is focused on her work as a hand poke tattoo artist. She’s been practicing since 2018, and now co-owns and operates Show Pony Studio, an emerging artists’ space, gallery, and private tattoo studio in downtown Ithaca, NY. Tattooing has become her way of staying present and directly creating meaning with others.
Let her know if you want a tattoo, she’d love to give you one!
When not tattooing or drawing, Matéa can be found moonlighting as #71 Joni Bitchell, skating for Ithaca Roller Derby’s SufferJets and New York City’s Gotham Roller Derby.
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“What is permanent within us? What do we deem important enough to make permanent? 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.
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