Slow looking and quiet observation of the outside world from an interior space results in Pierce’s fractured and refracted layering of colors in varying degrees of opacity, which coalesce in moments frozen in motion—an oxymoronic state of static flux. The majority of her paintings serve as responses to her surrounding environment, and thus feature domestic spaces, city views, plants, and portraits. Though discernible in their subject matter, the paintings that result from her meditative practice nevertheless lean towards abstraction, a heightened experiential intensity, and perhaps even a hallucinatory sensation.
While Pierce’s work has thus been rooted in a phenomenological experience of light, space, and time, most often framed by the view from her window, recent changes in her home life have caused her newest work to become more centered on the immediate present—and those simple pleasures of life in her house and garden. Though the softly geometric patterns of color that emerge as thin washes of paint are layered one upon another so as to create a translucent kaleidoscopic effect of refracted light continue to characterize her work, the paintings on view now evidence a newfound stillness.
Stephanie Pierce's work has been exhibited at The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; The Staten Island Museum, New York; and Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina. She received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2014. Her work has been featured in New Yorker Magazine, Harper’s and is included in the collections of William Dreyfus, Joan and Roger Sonnabend, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Walton Family Foundation and the Boston Public Library among others. Pierce currently lives and works in Brooklyn.