Half Gallery will open Meghann Stephenson‘s I’ll Be Your Mirror at their Los Angeles location on May 3, 2025.
The exhibition title is taken from the 1967 classic by The Velvet Underground. Nico sings, “I’ll be your mirror/Reflect what you are/in case you don’t know..” In contemporary art circles, the same phrase is most often associated with Nan Goldin’s book accompanying her 1996 mid-career survey at The Whitney Museum of American Art, expanding on ideas of what needs to be seen societally. For painter Meghann Stephenson, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” suggests a different prism of reflection to explore the perils of girlhood and the miscommunication inherent in self-reporting . Digging through the adolescent remnants around personal discomfort and loss of innocence, Stephenson attempts to sort through all of the iterations we turn ourselves into in the name of acceptance. “Girlhood can feel particularly lonely,” she continues, “so you make all the best parts of yourself smaller, and all the worst big enough to be a shield. You become a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”
In the midst of this experience, Stephenson believes, we are all Alice in Wonderland, grown too big for our houses, but too small to reach the key on the table that offers the only way out. Through paintings like “A Sheep In Wolf’s Clothing,” a tense portrait of a girl in a fur coat that clearly isn’t hers, and “You’re On Your Own,” which shows a girl swallowed in an endless hedge maze with no visible exit, the painter examines the anxieties of forging an identity and navigating the world, both internally and externally. “You Know Me” uses the surreal repetition of the same figure to represent the overwhelming feeling of judgement, whether real of imagined, from both others and ourselves.
Within this body of work, we find echoes of John Currin, Marcel Duchamp, Judith Leyster, Frans Hals, Sofia Coppola, Deborah Turbeville and even Eadweard Muybridge. A game of telephone all artists play with art history in 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 ground which has a polarizing effect reflecting a flipped image back to the viewer. The science and emotions behind this exchange are part magic and part maddening to reveal a distortion we witness as truth.