The Unibrow Interview: Meghann Stephenson is Queen of the Neighborhood!

When my colleague Shaquille Heath spoke with Meghann Stephenson earlier this year the print edition of our Issue 02, there was a line that struck me: “There’s also this inherent human quality of expecting the worst to happen. And I can’t remember where I heard this, but anxiety is just your brain preparing for that in an attempt to self-soothe. And if your brain tends to do that anyway, it’s like, really good source material!” There’s a lot to investigate there, and it feels like in these times, the ability to channel anxiety and fear, is paramount. The worst thing that can happen is just around the corner, almost every hour, and how to we create from that?

Stephenson is about to open Queen of the Neighborhood!, her third solo show at Half Gallery, and she’s taken on Dante’s Inferno. That’s 9 circles of Hell she is depicting, but the Inferno through “the artist’s exploration of femininity, morality, and social expectation.” I wanted to know more.

Evan Pricco: Let’s start with the title, "Queen of the Neighborhood!," and the genesis of how you came to it. 
Meghann Stephenson: I was listening to “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill one evening while working on the show, the first lyric is “that girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood”, and at first the statement feels like a judgement, but it's actually a beautiful ode to female defiance. There were already contrasting references to the suburbs and Eve in the Garden throughout the works. I thought, what if hell was a suburban neighborhood? At its core, this show is about the shame and judgment women experience, and the title felt bratty in the right way. 

EP: Do you normally think of titles at the end of a body of work before it heads to the gallery, or do you come up with them earlier? 
MS: It depends, sometimes I have a title for a piece before I start painting and the title informs the work. More often, the title comes while I’m working on it or after. Naming the pieces is one of my favorite parts because it helps give a little sense of direction and solidifies the tone of the work. 

EP: There was something you said in the interview with us earlier this year, in print: "I don’t want to force an answer on somebody. I think the goal is to have people figure it out and apply the meaning that they’re sensing from it." There are so many different topics you are tackling in this show, religion and gender and literary canons, and I wonder if sometimes... just maybe... you do want to hold someone's hand to some starting points to the work? 
MS: I think I’ve always offered a bit of a starting point, just with a more specific framework this time. It gives the viewer something to consider, but there’s still a lot to discover and interpret.

EP: Something you do so well, powerfully, is strip away extraneous parts of a painting and truly focus on a very direct visual that you are trying to convey. In a way, it is really poetic; everything matters. How do you think that has developed over the years for you?
MS: Thank you! For better or worse, I’m a pretty direct person, and I think that comes through in the work. I try my best to distill an idea as much as possible and communicate it in a way that feels natural to me. Over the years, I think I’ve slowly built a language for the work and become more attuned to what is necessary and what isn’t.

EP: What surprises you, years into your career, about yourself when you leave the studio and see the works hanging in a gallery? Do you see new things then? Do you understand yourself as an artist in new ways? 
MS: It’s a very surreal experience to work on something alone over the course of a year and then all of a sudden it’s in the world. There’s a sense of clarity in finishing a show and seeing the pieces together in a gallery. After this show, I was surprised by the arc my first three solo shows have taken, from womanhood to girlhood to origins. Each show left me with questions that the next show seemed to answer. Mostly, though, I’m always struck by the support and by how the works resonate.

EP: What has been your favorite piece of art or show you saw this year? 
MS: The Gnoli show at Levy Gorvy Dayan blew me away. I’ve pored over the works for years but seeing them in person is a completely different experience. To see the texture and scale, especially in that space, was a dream. Two shows I wish I could have seen in person were Michael Borremans and Victor Man, both at David Zwirner.