Bridget Stehli – Lantana

In Lantana, Bridget Stehli draws us into a world where the detritus of suburban ritual collides with the latent charge of ancient symbolism. Stehli conjures this psychic terrain not as a unified world but as a haunted zone, where the recent past is brought into the now; faded but familiar. The title’s namesake, a tenacious weed, becomes metaphor for cultural latency and quiet subversion. What was once suppressed returns, unruly and unresolved.

Stehli’s installation, a teenage bedroom theatre conjured from lo-fi materials and the wishful thinking of DIY, evokes the suspended space of adolescence; a holding pattern of unrealised dreams. The stick bundles nod to The Blair Witch Project and the aesthetics of suburban occultism: ad hoc spiritual practices, quiet rebellions, and the private mythologies individuals build outside mainstream religion or science. Paintings slip between recognition and dissolution. Found photographs, costumes, and archetypes (the devil, the witch, the girl) reappear like motifs in a dream – familiar, half- formed, resistant to resolution.

In this space, the witch is present but not explicit – less a figure than a trace or resonance. As feminist theorists like Silvia Federici have argued, the witch represents a long history of resistance to capitalist and patriarchal control – childless, autonomous, disinter- ested in conformity. Here, she’s not centre stage but embedded in atmosphere: in the bedroom altar, in a painted mask, in the lan- guage of fringe rituals and suburban spells. Stehli’s devil also steps outside familiar moral frameworks. Rather than the Christian villain, he takes on a gnostic role – as a bearer of hidden knowledge, mis- understood and cast out by dominant religion. This gnostic thread weaves quietly through the exhibition, suggesting lost wisdom, a sense of estrangement from institutionalised belief systems, and a possible return to belief through feeling rather than fixed doctrine.

In Lantana, Stehli resists didacticism. There are no solutions offered, only a space to sense the unresolved. She paints as a form of intuitive expression: pre-verbal, embodied, and unapologetically analogue. The images that emerge read like a kind of cultural hallu- cination; we see the echoes of utopian promise, religion as social experiment and the anticlimax of late capitalism. In this context, the work stages a quiet reckoning by holding up a mirror to the debris of our collective fears and desires. 

– Text by Chelsea Lehmann