Morgan Ogilvie often paints “unreliable” female narrators culled from Western iconography in order to evoke the unease that pervades the current cultural moment.  She brings together talismanic portraits of girls in Halloween costumes and a larger reimagining of the logo from the American film company Columbia Pictures — the torch-bearing Lady Liberty shown in theaters before films, visually ubiquitous in the United States.

Paint is at the center of these works. Original brushstrokes remain visible, letting the medium itself be part of the story. The children’s costumes — from fantastical uniforms to hybrid pop-cultural archetypes — act as partial stories, offering perspectives that are performative and slightly off-kilter. It can be tempting to focus on the “cute” qualities of children or their spooky access to other realms. Exploring this tension, Ogilvie uses the fluidity and blurriness of paint to interrogate the real versus pretend world of young females in costumes, alongside images of girls cast in famous horror films.

Lady Liberty gestures toward larger cultural myths that feel unsettled. She is a symbol of mediation, perfect for our cultural moment, embodying how narratives are constructed and degrade. By showing the construction of the image — including small “mistakes” — Ogilvie invites viewers into a quiet kind of revery. The familiar becomes strange, play meets myth, and paint itself conjures worlds that exist only in the act of making. Cheerful colors hide eerie content, and the work may initially seem “safe.” As Thomas Lawson wrote in Last Exit: Painting (1981), painting is “…a device of misrepresentation, a deconstructive tool designed to undermine the certainty of appearances.” The work itself is disguised by its own seeming palatability, so too, its truths are masked by a superficial conservatism. The work, in essence, wears its own costume.