Meghann Stephenson’s Tender Paintings Contrast Women’s Agency with ‘Acceptable Behavior’

In elegant, meditative paintings by Meghann Stephenson, the inner lives of women are illuminated through subtle symbolism. The Los Angeles-based artist is known for her figurative paintings and still-lifes emphasizing repetition, reflection, and mystery. Often, we encounter a puzzle-like quality to her work in the form of knots, mazes, or duplicates. Next month, a show of nine paintings at Half Gallery continues her exploration of the relationship between inner states and societal constraints.

Queen of the Neighborhood! will include a suite of new paintings that correspond to the nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, the 14th-century narrative poem in which each concentric level of the underworld is reached by committing a sin greater than the last. Each composition represents a specific wrongdoing, observed through a feminine lens, “where anger, violence, vanity, desire, and inaccessibility take quieter, more intimate form,” the gallery says.

Stephenson’s approach to actions considered taboo or even evil is nuanced and poetic, portraying women in nightgowns against deep backgrounds in a stark contrast of light and dark, innocence and treachery. The artist plumbs the psychology of “acceptable behavior” expected of women and gender roles that pervade the social fabric of Western society.

In “Are You Looking Up?” for instance, a woman’s legs are encircled by a picket fence, an all-American symbol of prosperity and safety. Here, it is also an unassuming suburban cage, nodding to the pervasive patriarchal expectation that women’s sole allegiance should be to home and family, granting them little agency.

Instead of literal depictions of sins, Stephenson’s works “consider the subtle behaviors, desires, and expressions through which women have historically been perceived to transgress, positioning both subjects and viewers within shifting roles of judgment and complicity.” At a time when politicians and religious fundamentalists have been given a platform to challenge women’s right to vote, Stephenson’s pared-down study of women’s emotions and mental states taps into a pervasive tension and fatigue. All the same, these women appear calm, collected, and pensive as we catch them in what may be the the very moment that precedes action.

Queen of the Neighborhood! runs from September 9 to October 8 in New York. See more on the artist’s Instagram.

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