Projections on Canvas: Gavin Meeler's Radical Subjectivity

By @JustinWetch

"I came down and the whole TV was in pieces. The screen was dumped outside."

Five-year-old Gavin Meeler stood frozen, watching his grandfather transform their television into a cross for church. The wooden frame that once held Saturday morning cartoons would soon hang in their Baptist sanctuary.

"In a way, it was inspiring," Gavin reflects now. "You turn one thing into another. But as a kid, it's also kind of devastating."

While the adults waged holy wars over his soul, young Gavin built cardboard empires in his bedroom. He'd construct elaborate auction houses, playing every role: auctioneer, competing artists, audience members. His child brain always made himself the main character. His art always sold for "quadrillion dollars."

Gavin grew up split between extremes in rural Georgia. His grandfather forbade television. His father watched Kill Bill with him. One uncle painted every verse of the Bible. His dad painted trucks for a living, coming home covered in accidental art.

The auction house game wasn't just play. Using green-tinted paper from truck stop printers that felt like canvas to his small hands, Gavin created entire galleries on his bedroom walls. Years before he knew who Picasso was, before anyone taught him composition, he was living inside his own art market prophecy.

"As a kid, you just make up numbers," he laughs. "Quadrillion. You don't even know what it means."

By middle school, the prophecy had darkened. In eighth grade, Gavin was placed in alternative school after hanging with the wrong crowd. They took away his normal classes including art, isolating him with violent kids who'd pull knives over nothing. Once when he pulled a pencil from his pocket to draw, a cop put his hand on his gun holster, thinking Gavin was reaching for a weapon.

"It felt like prison. The violence followed me around until high school."

When he could draw again, art became his voice. Grotesque scenes poured out, inspired by the chaos surrounding him. "I was in a dark place. One of those kids with hair in my face."

Yet something strange happened every August: "On the first day of school, people would come up and look in my binder to see what I'd been drawing over summer. They'd surround me, and for like one second, I was popular."

His art teacher saw something beneath the darkness: "You have something special that not everyone has. You're the alpha in this class. If you show more interest, it'll inspire people around you."

Meanwhile, his father's truck painting shop provided a different education. Paint splattered every wall. Workers grinding through torn thumbnails, wrapped in duct tape, never stopping. One man worked through terminal cancer.

"They'd spill paint and be like 'Oh shit,' angry because it costs money," Gavin recalls. "But I found it fascinating."

High school brought three art classes in senior year, all with Courtney, his future wife. They bonded over their mutual love for making art. For years, she'd been his anchor between logic and delusion.

“She came from a world of logic and we opened each other's minds,” Gavin says. “She taught me logic and I taught her delusion.”

She questioned his vague dreams of making it in art for a few months early on. Then one day in art class, Gavin created something that made her stop. "Okay, I get it now. You have something really special." She stayed on board for the next eleven years, through poverty, through crashes, through everything.

"Delusion is a big part of success," Gavin explains now. "It doesn't exactly make sense why you'd succeed."

His father modeled this perfectly. Once, he wore ugly plaid grandpa pants to work. Everyone mocked him. So he wore them every single day after. "Whatever you throw at him, he throws the opposite back."

Right after high school, Gavin quit Pizza Hut. A girl from school wanted to buy a painting for $800. When she said "That's okay" to his price, Gavin thought she meant "I'm not interested." She actually meant she'd buy it, paying in installments from her Subway job.

The delusion suddenly had a receipt.

By 2021, Gavin and Courtney were married, broke, living with her parents. They'd stand in thrift stores waiting for eBay sales to hit their bank account so they could buy canvas. They kept an old Burger King cup in the car for free refills. When money was tight, they made canvases from cardboard and staples.

Then Gavin saw Gary Vee interviewing FEWOCiOUS about selling digital art in auction houses. "Full circle to my cardboard auctions."

The next day, Gavin minted his first NFT on a phone so cheap it had numbers for a name. The art app would crash after 5 to 10 minutes. He had no stylus, just his finger on cracked glass.

"Every piece I made in 2021 was off my phone."

Gabe Weis, an artist Gavin had followed for years, helped with pricing. Gavin didn't even know what Ethereum equaled in dollars. Within two weeks, OpenSea featured his work. "Sales were flooding in. Sold overnight."

The phone that crashed every ten minutes had created art that sold instantly. OpenSea featured him on their homepage.

MC Hammer retweeted him. Paris Hilton followed. Gary Vee bought his work. The cardboard auction house had become Times Square billboards.

"2021 was bizarre. Absurd things happening."

"The weirdest part of 2021 was all that build-up... then crickets."

Ninety percent of Gavin's collectors vanished. The crypto market crashed. Artists who'd celebrated at NFT NYC packed up and never returned. Gavin had to rebuild from scratch.

In April 2024, it happened again. Down to two or three likes per post. "You could scroll down and see nobody there."

The pattern was clear: boom, crickets, rebuild. Success wasn't linear. It was cyclical, demanding either absolute faith or absolute delusion.

"The green I used in The Glare meant a lot to me," Gavin says. "It's the color of accents in our house growing up. Nobody will ever get that. You can't explain the nostalgia or pain that comes with that specific color."

This revelation unlocked everything. Gavin isn't trying to communicate. He's projecting. Like Basquiat throwing his mental state at canvas, like Picasso abandoning realism once cameras made it pointless.

The Meeler Hand, that oversized appendage throughout his work? "It represents life and death. After 50 years, that hand will look different, wrinkled. It shows how time passed."

His Twisted Playthings series turns discarded toys into human trauma. Potato Heads having affairs, broken Barbies forced into dark situations. "You take real things we go through and attach them to kid toys."

But not every piece needs a story. "Sometimes I can just show a feeling."

"If you're trying to understand why I did it," Gavin says, "you probably won't understand it. I'm handing it off to whoever the viewer is, hoping they understand it for themselves."

The boy making cardboard auctions for quadrillion-dollar sales has become an artist who doesn't need anyone to understand his green walls, his oversized hands, his projections. The grandfather who smashed TVs to make crosses taught him transformation. But unlike destruction for dogma, Gavin transforms trauma into shock factor, poverty into paint, crashes into radical subjectivity that doesn't require your comprehension to exist.

"I want my work to feel timeless. Like you've almost seen it before, but you haven't."

@Gavinmeeler shouts out @CozomoMedici for putting him on the map post-crash, @RaoulGMI for recent support, and @AmateurInvest8r who never left through the crickets. Artists inspiring him: @MaNiCArt_ (who he honored with "Feeling Like Manic"), @GabrielJWeis (Instagram inspiration turned NFT mentor), @toadswiback, and @lphaCentauriKid.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Gavin recommends @egodead, @BHAREBOY, and @RedruMxART.