Half Gallery will open Meghann Stephenson‘s I am going to Be Your Mirror at their Los Angeles location on Might 3, 2025.
The exhibition title is taken from the 1967 basic by The Velvet Underground. Nico sings, “I will be your mirror/Mirror what you’re/in case you do not know..” In up to date artwork circles, the identical phrase is most frequently related to Nan Goldin’s guide accompanying her 1996 mid-career survey at The Whitney Museum of American Artwork, increasing on concepts of what must be seen societally. For painter Meghann Stephenson, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” suggests a special prism of reflection to discover the perils of girlhood and the miscommunication inherent in self-reporting . Digging by way of the adolescent remnants round private discomfort and lack of innocence, Stephenson makes an attempt to kind by way of the entire iterations we flip ourselves into within the identify of acceptance. “Girlhood can really feel notably lonely,” she continues, “so that you make all the perfect elements of your self smaller, and all of the worst large enough to be a defend. You change into a sheep in wolf’s clothes.”
Within the midst of this expertise, Stephenson believes, we’re all Alice in Wonderland, grown too massive for our homes, however too small to succeed in the important thing on the desk that gives the one means out. By way of work like “A Sheep In Wolf’s Clothes,” a tense portrait of a lady in a fur coat that clearly is not hers, and “You are On Your Personal,” which exhibits a lady swallowed in an countless hedge maze with no seen exit, the painter examines the anxieties of forging an identification and navigating the world, each internally and externally. “You Know Me” makes use of the surreal repetition of the identical determine to signify the overwhelming feeling of judgement, whether or not actual of imagined, from each others and ourselves.
Inside this physique of labor, we discover echoes of John Currin, Marcel Duchamp, Judith Leyster, Frans Hals, Sofia Coppola, Deborah Turbeville and even Eadweard Muybridge. A sport of phone all artists play with artwork historical past within the hopes of discovering new frontiers, Stephenson acknowledges that the mirror itself is in some sense a black hole- this sheet of clear glass mounted to a black floor which has a polarizing impact reflecting a flipped picture again to the viewer. The science and feelings behind this trade are half magic and half maddening to disclose a distortion we witness as reality.
