The Threefold Structure of the Work
The stage, in Bangs’ paintings, is never a simple backdrop but a meticulously orchestrated spatial apparatus. The opening of curtains, the tilt of light, the suspension of fabric…these stenographic elements build a self-referential system in which the stage becomes the site of the gaze, the place where the mask begins to loosen, and where intention, power, and vulnerability surface. It questions the visible structures of power and calls into reconsideration the act of looking itself: Who is observing? What is seen? Why do we look?
The actors are her personified objects. Pears, drapery, architectural fragments, and ambiguous bodily forms form a cast suspended between life and stillness. They belong neither fully to the human nor to the material. They breathe, fade, fall, and revive, performing scenes of presence again and again in the flow of light.These actors seem caught in the process of performances going awry — removing a mask, hovering between self-disclosure and self-protection. They are expected to be beautiful yet restrained; they are subjected to the gaze and gradually grow weary under its weight.
Light is the most elusive presence in Bangs’ work. It does more than illuminate; it acts as a being imbued with consciousness and intention. It glides across surfaces, gathers in folds, and recedes in reflections, like ripples of time passing over the objects. Its soft glow and diffusion create a texture of time, moving the image into a threshold where dream and waking, perception and memory blur. Light becomes a narrative agent and almost a hand—gently easing the mask away, exposing the structural and emotional strata beneath. It is simultaneously an external optical phenomenon and an internal projection of awareness.
Across Bangs’ paintings, there prevails a state of suspended existence: objects floating, structures destabilized, time seemingly paused. This psychological lightness allows viewers to undergo their own moment of “mask-shedding,” confronting their emotions, desires, and uncertainties through the act of looking.Thus, Bangs’ narrative turns inward, toward perception itself, toward the sedimentation of time within the body, and toward the lived texture of feeling.
This exhibition is made possible with the collaboration of Megan Mulrooney Gallery.
About Artists
Piper Bangs (b. 2002 in San Antonio, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter who earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting at Laguna College of Art and Design in Spring 2024. Bangs has had solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angelas, CA and The Watermill Center in Watermill, NY and was recently an artist in residence at the Mack Art Foundation this winter. She has exhibited her work in venues such as Sehwa Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea, Uffner & Liu Gallery in New York, NY, The Pit in Palm Springs, CA, and the Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio, Texas, among others.