Meghann Stephenson and the Beauty of Losing Control
On Precarity, Poise, and the Art of Letting Go.
There’s a moment—just before something spills, breaks, or unravels—where time seems to slow down. It’s the last fragile second before a drink tips over, before a carefully balanced life collapses, before the illusion shatters.
This is the space where Meghann Stephenson’s work lives.
Her paintings are not loud declarations of collapse but quiet implosions. They slow the world down to an endless moment of tension, where eternity can hover between 50% odds of disaster or a 50% hallucinogenic dream sequence.
Within her first solo exhibition show, Swan Dive, staged at the Half Gallery in New York at the end of the 2024, Stephenson has asked her viewers: Who gets to fall apart? And is there power in choosing to fall apart?
These are my three favourites, and if you stick to the end you’ll get a quick story about when my therapist called me out recently for being neurotic. I promise it relates.
The Elegance of Precarity: Delicate
At first glance, Delicate is almost too perfect. As with many of Stephenson’s works, she paints a pristine tablecloth, and two martinis (I imagine chilled to perfection) staged against a flat black background. The composition pushes the martini glasses directly into an inescapable confrontation with the viewer, so it is impossible to overlook their imminent collapse.
These perfect symbols of sophistication and indulgence are poised to tip off the table and shatter. The inevitable mess is already making me cringe.
With the martini's rise back to its rightful place as the hot-girl drink of New York society (I’m partial to the dirty vodka martini at Lobby Bar, but I will order it almost anywhere and am just happy when they give me a sidecar with it), the composition exudes high-end indulgence, the kind of effortless luxury that exists only in art, film, and a well-curated Instagram feed. Their precarious placement complicates the perfection of the image and stinks of the dark side of those feelings of effortless elegance always take.
This is where Stephenson’s skill as a storyteller becomes clear. The scene feels like a moment of suspended animation, like a bug caught in resin. An unsettling quality to the perfection on the edge of destruction makes you want to watch until the dreadful end.
You know what’s coming. You can see it. But for now, the illusion of control remains intact.
But this brings me to the question: Who is allowed to lose control?
Men who unravel are often seen as tortured geniuses—Hemingway, Van Gogh, any brooding literary hero you can name. Their destruction is romanticized, their downfall inevitable yet somehow dignified. Women, on the other hand, do not get the same luxury. A woman who falls apart is not tragic—she is messy. A cautionary tale. Something to be pitied, or worse, fixed.
The Myth of the Graceful Fall: Swan Dive
In Swan Dive, a swan plunges downward, wings stretched out, headfirst into darkness. It is pristine, poised—even in freefall. The swan knows where she is going, even if it's to her demise.
Of course, the swan has long been a symbol of elegance, purity, and control. The relationship between these birds and the women who are impeccably groomed and glide effortlessly through society while paddling like hell beneath the surface was famously immortalized by Truman Capote as his sobriquet for his circle of New York socialites.
There is an FX Series from last year Feud: Capote vs. Swans. Don’t watch it because it is good. It isn’t. Watch it because the 70s New York interiors are fantastic and Tom Hollander. No notes. Just Tom Hollander.
As a swan, everything is fabulous and flawless, until, inevitably, they get plucked, stuffed, and served at a dinner party they weren’t even invited to once they’ve fallen from grace. Haven’t you seen Gossip Girl?
Stephenson captures the moment when the illusion breaks. The swan is no longer in control and she is headed straight to the bottom.
I love that with this piece the title itself is a contradiction. A swan dive is a term for self-destruction, yet it’s also a movement that demands skill and precision. This is not a swan tumbling to its doom—it is diving with intention. A swan dive is, literally, a controlled and elegant movement downward. But in a metaphorical sense, it’s a term associated with spiraling, falling apart, unraveling.
And that’s where Stephenson’s composition is so powerful—it places the swan in a state of suspended transformation, caught between elegance and collapse, leaving us uncertain which one it will become.
This shift is critical. Is falling apart always a failure? What if self-destruction is actually a form of agency?
Stephenson’s painting recalls historical images of swans in Dutch still-life paintings, often depicted as hunted, limp, and lifeless—symbols of sacrifice and beauty lost. But her swan is alive. It is mid-flight. It is choosing to dive.
It reminds me of Camilla from The Secret History—cool, controlled, ethereal (what book is this you ask? Only the single most devastating novel my 19-y/o self had ever read. Tartt gave me my first ‘book hangover’).
Camilla is the kind of girl who seems untouched by the world. She is unknowable to the reader and the other characters, exists more as a myth than as a fully realized person. But beneath the surface, you know she is slipping.
The question is: Is she falling, or is she letting go?
[I have more to say here but there will be spoilers!!! So skip ahead if you haven’t had the good fortune to read this.]
Camilla Macaulay, like the swan in Swan Dive, exists in a state of poised freefall—composed even as she descends, untouchable even in collapse. She is not punished for her choices, nor is she excused; she simply exists without explanation, without the need for redemption or condemnation.
Existing without explanation is not something I was taught to do. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done.
The Rejection of Fragility: Who Wants to Be a Cut Flower When You Can Be a Weed?
This is perhaps the most defiant of Stephenson’s works. A pair of red Mary Jane heels—immaculate, shiny, almost too perfect—sit next to something unexpected: a weed.
Immediately, you’re confronted by contrast. The perfectly patent red shoes, the black and white background, and the dandelion breaking through the ground.
Inspired by the classic folk tale by Hans Christian Andersen, where a girl is given a pair of enchanted red shoes that force her to dance endlessly, unable to stop, until she begs to have her feet cut off. It’s a cautionary tale about unchecked female desire, a warning against straying outside the boundaries of acceptable womanhood.
Stephenson is asking you a question and you must answer (duh, it's in the title) – if people are going to cut you down if you aren’t within their realm of appropriate behaviour (i.e. a cut flower) be a weed instead, studier and grounded in its place.
I like thinking of this painting in conjunction with Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ reinterpretation of the folk tale from Women Who Run With the Wolves. She is part Jungian psychoanalyst, part myth-weaver, part storyteller-priestess. Whether you read her as a spiritual guide or a gifted mythologist, she leaves you with the feeling that you are more wild, more ancient, and more powerful than you realized.
Estés reads this story as a metaphor for lost wildness, not for the warning against wildness Anderson intends it to be. The girl, originally free and instinctual, is adopted into a world of rules. She loses herself. And when she finally reclaims her red shoes, she doesn’t know how to wear them properly. She is consumed by them.
Stephenson’s painting presents us with an alternative ending. One more in line with Estés.
Instead of being the girl trapped by the shoes, we are offered another choice: the weed. The thing that refuses to be pruned, plucked, or contained. The thing that grows in cracks, despite being unwanted. The thing that survives.
And here’s the quiet power of the work: What if survival isn’t about ensuring you are cared for, but about being impossible to get rid of?
In the end, Stephenson reminds us that perfection is overrated and control a flimsy façade. Her work is a rallying cry for the beautifully untamed—a deliberate plunge into chaos that reclaims the art of falling.
This stuff all feels especially relevant today. With the permanence we are constantly reminded about the internet, my mind immediately goes to “if I’m going to put anything out there it will have to be perfect.” Perfectionism, I know, I’m working on it.
But I can’t even begin to tell you how many things this has stopped me from doing. Has held me in place. In fact, even as I work on sharing my thoughts, being ok with the inevitable disagreement or worse empty quiet resounding back from the online void, I’m avoiding other things that scare me more. My therapist recently told me “I feel like you’re avoiding all your plans by writing substack articles. I mean thats great, but you’re hiding from yourself. You can keep paying me, but I don’t want to play hide-and-go-seek with you.” OK READ ME MUCH.
Well, they’re going to fail regardless if I don’t do them, and no one else will. So in a way I am right from the jump. Although we all know that is not what my therapist meant.
I suppose this is one of the reasons that I keep revisiting Stephenson’s work. It’s a reminder that when the illusion finally shatters, we’re left with the raw, intoxicating truth: losing control isn’t a failure, it’s a fierce act of liberation.
More and more, I am working to be liberated from myself, my own doubts, insecurities. I’m trying to be more like Estés Girl in the Red Shoes - releasing control to my own wildness, not requiring perfection, but persisting in just being.
THINGNESS wow a new obsession rears its head, excuse me while I dive into a Wikipedia rabbit hole
There's so much richness of thought here, I scarcely know where to begin. I'm simultaneously compelled to recall Yeats' “The Second Coming” ("things fall apart; the center cannot hold"), self-reflect on the gendered dynamics of broken men and their mythologies (I am guilty of idolizing Townes Van Zandt), and to brainstorm ways to incorporate Stephenson into my next lecture.
Damn it, Georgia. Stop adding to my pile(s) of things to do!
For the sake of brevity, I should simply say that your analysis of Stephenson has extreme potential for New Object Philosophy. I found myself ruminating quite strongly about your comment on Stephenson's "Delicate": “an unsettling quality to the perfection on the edge of destruction makes you want to watch until the dreadful end." In your framework, the tension of the piece relies on the "illusion of control," and this seems a valuable insight to reframing traditional subject-object dynamics. I won't bore you (or your readership) with a summary of Heideggerian philosophy, but damn, if human control of the non-human isn't the essence of vorhandenheit and zuhandenheit, I don't know what is. Bill Brown puts things very succinctly:
"We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily," (2001, 4).
What I find interesting in your approach is that the "thingness" of Stephenson's glasses (their unknowable nature as non-human entities) is encountered not in the moment of their breaking, but in the moment BEFORE. It is even the threat of their breaking that arrests their flow and causes them to be front and center to our perception, rather than fading into the background of casual use. Glorious.
I will be presenting in Prague on New Object Philosophy next week. You can guarantee I'll be citing Stephenson as well as "Gnosienne."