Taking note of her context, Shepherd effectively pursues these networks of frictional ideas and confrontations to build out a practice borne of direct experience and research-driven fervor. Between the holy/unholy fractures, the murders and subsequent hauntings at Redpath Mansion, and the Allan Memorial Institute’s history of MK Ultra trials, Shepherd observes the traces left behind and implicates them within her work. Shepherd maintains, however, that she is not bound to one medium, but submits her perspective to an array of outlets, be it writing, cinema, or sculpture. The later formal mode is represented here in a new manifestation of her soap sculptures. This time around Shepherd has decorated these cast urethane objects with human hair, their forms matching those found in the haunted home of her grandmother.

The title of this exhibition, Phantasmata, understood as "hallucinations created by thought," was coined by the multi-hyphenate Swiss thinker Paracelsus. In accordance, this show is upheld by notions of the specter, mental representations of an object, and disembodiment. All of these concepts culminate in the yellowish palette, marked by the antique and domestic. She demonstrates a cohesion of tones as shades of wood and candlelight brush against evocations of old latex, sun-worn skin, and murky bath water. These frictions between gross/sinister and warm/holy are consistent touchstones within Shepherd’s practice. The context, too, plays its role in administering a certain atmosphere. Pangée’s location is haunted by its history as home to a crazed heiress, whose presence is doubled by the remaining candelabras and burnt sienna tones that distinguish the gallery. In submitting these perturbations to a marked tenderness, Shepherd builds her own atmosphere from the one that she has inherited in the course of the residency.

Her paintings consistently revolve around the fetishistic, as Shepherd mines online search engines, probing them for content that is aligned with obscure erotics. In “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature,” Mike Kelley writes about sexual imagery and acts after their transition into the realm of taboo. He states that pornography “tends to be body-part specific,” its material “encapsulating the erotic entirety in the fragment.” Its artifacts are “cut out and isolated, and thus no less metaphoric: they become objectified stand-ins and irreal substitutes for themselves.” It is precisely because of their isolationism that “they gain the distance of the fetish.” Shepherd traces this evolution of documented sex and its inherent subjugation as it yields a near complete “abstraction” of the aforementioned pornographic parts. The resulting pieces, however, ultimately “rise pleasurably back into consciousness in their new form,” per Kelley’s estimation. This also works in tandem with the conditions of a secret society - internal procedures, rites or rituals, and private space. Performance and intimacy are thus critical links between fetish communities and clandestine organizations.

Within Shepherd’s practice, mundanity is transformed into sumptuous images of cropped heels and exposed garters. Silk and lace flow across canvases, too, their erotics motivated by decontextualizaiton. A particular lust is inscribed within images of dirty feet and bound women, too, which Shepherd identifies and attunes her painterly gaze to. The disappearing contents that she extracts from the web are increasingly subject to algorithmic erasure, as tech is catching up with the subversive side of things. Satiety is ultimately kept at bay in Shepherd’s world, allowing desire to proliferate through a swell of considerate brushstrokes. One painting offers an unmounted La Tour candle, seen balancing between thighs and a mess of plastic wrap. Another image presents a white-heeled foot delicately balanced in a soiled bathtub. Shepherd induces these desirous compositions by constructing patterns from source material and lived experience. She also traces the contours of private and public spaces, whether literal or psychological.

Text by Reilly Davidson

Brittany Shepherd (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across painting, photography, video, sound installation, and sculpture, engaging each medium with an image-based approach. Shepherd creates, deconstructs, and reinterprets representational images to play with perceptions of what is designated private and public, both spatially as well as psychologically, with a penchant for eliciting mystery, desire, melancholy, and mundanity. Shepherd's recent paintings observe, collect, and reconstitute images from online fetish communities, formulating new narratives that eclipse the source of inspiration while creating new imagery that is circulated across disparate digital spheres.

Shepherd received her BFA in Integrated Media from OCADU in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Deliverance (2022), presented at MAMOTH, London; Sub Rosa (2022), at In Lieu, Los Angeles; Waltz of the Mired (2021), at Chris Andrews, Montreal; and solo presentation at Material Art Fair in CDMX (2022) with Someday Gallery, New York City. Recent group exhibitions include Wanderlust (2023), at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; Ashes to Lashes, Dust to Lust (2023) at GROVE, Berlin, as well as PLATFORM by David Zwirner (2022), with In Lieu, Los Angeles.