Big Dance — Mary Stephenson

The centerpiece of Mary Stephenson’s exhibition Big Dance is a painting of the same name: commanding in scale, yet more enveloping than confrontational. Characterized by diffuse, glowing fields in washy, sage-green paint, the image depicts a vacant labyrinthine corridor. Here, doorways open to nowhere and a choreography of rectangles that tilt and hover at unstable angles, like floorboards of thought in formation. As such, the painting is both a structural and pictorial passageway into the exhibition, where Stephenson builds images from an understanding of perception as inherently cerebral and somatic. For the artist, what is seen and what is unseen—but materially felt—forms the scaffolding for memory and meaning. What emerges is less a depiction than a condition of an image, and a sense of “being” in the world, recalling filmic projection as much as painterly surface.