Brian Keith Stephens. I Believe in Miracles

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In this highly anticipated solo exhibition, Brian Keith Stephens invites us to share his vision of the vast dominion of small but profound marvels that occur unceasingly all around us. These newest paintings seek to remind us of an age-old dialogue with the cosmos that many of us have forsaken—an intimate and timeless conversation between present and past, the close-at-hand and the unfathomably distant, the trivial and the essential. Just behind the illusory veil of mundane life, he suggests, there lurks a magical dimension coextensive with our own, one gravid with life-affirming wonders. Almost half of the images in this series juxtapose wild animals with a playful, masquerading female figure who serves here as Stephens’ image of the eternal lover and the captivating other. Across nearly a dozen scenes, she adopts a wide range of personae alongside her untamed companions: sunbather, seductress, dancer, model, pinup, sibyl, sprite. Each pairing seems to hint at the near-infinite variety of marvelous beasts, ourselves included, that the living cosmos has cast up into the light from the depths of its irrepressibly creative spirit. Love in its myriad forms is the vital medium that binds these images together and animates them. Each of these canvases is a small act of pure passion, and as such each stands as an emissary of the life’s unexpected blissful miracles, great and small. We are all players in life’s never ending spectacle: we are animal, we are magical, and we are all moving forward together, linked inextricably to one another. ­ —Jeff Edwards, art critic and faculty member, School of Visual Arts, New York