SHANGHAI.- Linseed presents UK-based artist Mary Stephenson’s first Asian- Pacific solo exhibition, “Soft Serve”. With her distinctive, dark comedy, Stephenson’s highly saturated worlds move us from the familiar to the uncanny, taking us to the exploration of liminal places between the physical and internal states. The exhibition opens on December 30, 2022, and continues until March 4, 2023.
In contrast to her witty and playful depictions, often with frenzied choreographies, of figures and objects in her previous paintings, the exhibition comprises 15 new works that showcase a radical shift in Stephenson’s recent practice. The richly coloured scenes evoke otherworldliness and absurdity as the figures and characters disappear. Inanimate objects, whether it is a set of stacked pillows, an impaled lemon meringue pie, a chair, a piece of cloth, or other paraphernalia, with different motions captured - tilting, melting, unwrapping, floating, stalling - in subtler ways, taking place as the fountain of affective resonance and narratives of the unknowns.
Sometimes dimly lit, sometimes illuminated with fluorescent-like light, the artist often sets the background in a homogeneous plane, corner, or void-like space. Different from the definitive physicality of objects, a space, with its fuzziness, is open to more possibilities. Stephenson refers to these canvases as ‘pregnant spaces’, offering a mysterious, cinematic space for the unconscious to grow. Without human presence and activities, without lucid purpose revealed, the canvases capture the happening of transition, of becoming, of ephemerality, instead of being, transcending time and place, conveying a latent sense of lostness, uncertainty, melancholy, and nostalgia.
In The Rites of Passage, anthropologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep established a “three-fold sequential structure” of an individual or collective passages through the cycle of life or of nature - separation, transition, and incorporation, also known as “preliminal, liminal, and postliminal”; and the “liminal stage” is described as “a period of indeterminate identity, full of ambiguity and paradox.” As the contexts prior to separation and after incorporation are lost and yet-to-be, respectively; such an “anti- structural” state of “becoming” incubates the possibilities of re-collision. Stephenson’s blend of sense of distance and intimacy, of presence and absence, brings us to the soft edges and thresholds of the mind. Think of that as hypnagogia or hypnopompia, bounded by wakefulness and sleep, wandering between the stage of consciousness and unconsciousness, during those bewitching hours in midnights and early mornings, when everything swirls together, the boundaries among realities, memories, and imaginations dissolve.
