Lantana

In Lantana, Bridget Stehli draws us into a world where the detritus of suburban ritual collides with the latent charge of ancient symbolism. Stehli conjures this psychic terrain not as a unified world but as a haunted zone, where the recent past is brought into the now; faded but familiar. The title's namesake, a tenacious weed, becomes metaphor for cultural latency and quiet subversion.

Stehli's installation, a teenage bedroom theatre conjured from lo-fi materials and the wishful thinking of DIY, evokes the suspended space of adolescence. Paintings slip between recognition and dissolution. Found photographs, costumes, and archetypes (the devil, the witch, the girl) reappear like motifs in a dream – familiar, half-formed, resistant to resolution. The stick bundles nod to The Blair Witch Project and the aesthetics of suburban occultism: ad hoc spiritual practices, quiet rebellions, and the private mythologies individuals build outside mainstream religion or science.

In this space, the witch is present but not explicit – embedded in atmosphere: in the bedroom altar, in a painted mask, in the language of fringe rituals and suburban spells. Stehli resists didacticism. There are no solutions offered, only a space to sense the unresolved.