Выставка Меганн Стефенсон исследует религиозные корни женского стыда через призму «Божественной комедии»

4 min read Catholic school left an imprint on Los Angeles painter Meghann Stephenson. Even with a family that took an easygoing approach to religion, Bible study still managed to leave her with restrictive ideas of femininity and a looming fear of retribution should she defy them. “Those lessons really do impact you, especially in those formative years, and it took me a long time to shake off the built-in shame,” she tells Bazaar on a recent video call. Stephenson often reflects on femininity in her work, which is dominated by plush portraits of women and animals rendered in restrained palettes with remarkable technical control. Through these lush compositions, the artist has gained recognition for raising questions about society’s expectations of women, particularly the demands of feminine perfection and moral purity that she faced firsthand growing up. Now, in her third solo show, “Queen of the Neighborhood,” she shines a light on some of the ideological roots beneath those standards. On view at Half Gallery in New York through October 8, the exhibition features nine new paintings, each depicting a circle of hell described in Dante’s Inferno, filtered through the lens of suburban Catholic girlhood. “Dante’s Inferno is a really interesting framework for a show, because it provides such a concise map of morality,” Stephenson explains. “Working on this show really highlighted the construction of these systems and who they benefit. I want to be the one to benefit from my choices and actions and the way I live my life.” Stephenson grew up in the suburbs of Virginia and started art classes around age four. (She recalls that one of the first paintings she made was “a boat with very stormy seas.”) She went on to study at Parsons, then worked as a freelance illustrator for 10 years—before the Covid-19 lockdown reignited her desire to paint. By 2024, she mounted her first solo show in New York, “Swan Dive” at Half Gallery, which explored female rebellion as a way to reassert agency. For her second solo show, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” at Half Gallery Los Angeles, the artist tapped into her adolescence to understand the armor girls adopt as a tool for survival. “My first solo show was the first time that I created a concise body of work that had a narrative that I felt very attached to,” she says. “That process really changed and solidified the way that I was going to work moving forward. It’s funny because I see each show as a prequel to the show before, so the three form a reverse timeline. … My last two shows were very much focused on societal expectations, girlhood, womanhood. They left me wondering how we got here in the first place, so I really wanted to zoom out and engage with these foundational moral texts and origin stories.” With “Queen of the Neighborhood,” Stephenson traces how these religious moral codes continue to underlie even secular culture. In Inferno, Dante travels through the nine concentric circles of hell, with each level designed to punish specific sins, from lust to violence to treachery. Before each painting, the artist asked herself questions like: “What does feminine anger look like? What does feminine violence look like? How can I depict that subtly?” The first painting, Are You Looking Up?, portrays the first level—limbo, which peacefully houses virtuous souls who lived before Christ—by showing a woman in a white dress trapped within a miniature white picket fence. The tiny size of the fence humorously translates the idea of purgatory into a suburban landscape where the subdued figure “is not really that stuck, but patiently waiting and not taking action.” The titular painting, Queen of the Neighborhood, represents the sin of violence, punished in the seventh circle of hell. Stephenson paints three lily-white lambs jumping through a field beneath a pitch-black sky. The violence isn’t immediately obvious, but upon closer inspection, one can see that two of the lambs are mid-collision, leaving the last as a witness. Stephenson crafted the impact subtly to convey a more inconspicuous form of violence, rather than the brutish, masculine notion that might typically come to mind. “Thinking about feminine violence was tricky,” she explains. “I kept coming back to this idea of: Would anybody even recognize it if it was happening in front of them, or is it a little bit more subtle and covert and backhanded? I was trying to think of something very innocent, and since I’ve been working in the religious text world, the idea of a lamb came to mind: young lambs playing, and one is bucking and running into the other, and you can’t really tell if they’re playing or fighting, and they’re just seen as so innocent. But what if they’re not?” What Stephenson hoped to accomplish was “to provide language for something that somebody didn’t have the language for before they saw the works.” Collectively, the featured paintings twist the language of control to her liking, portraying her figures as both flawed subjects of female social conditioning and fully realized women with the agency to overcome it. This, she hopes, will offer others the outlet she needed to shed shame and reclaim their femininity, sins and all. The resulting tone is one of self-assurance, echoing the Bikini Kill lyric that inspired the show’s title: “That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood, I’ve got news for you, she is!”