Caroline Stephen

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Caroline Stephen is a visual artist who primarily works in photography and sculpture. Her work explores the performative aspects of femininity while tracing these expectations back to their origins in the social conditioning and symbolic play of girlhood. Stephen’s practice navigates the boundaries between self and other, subject and surrogate, using the photograph as a site of projection and displacement. Her portraits, whether of others or of herself in constructed roles, foreground the relational dynamics of looking, where the subject becomes a surface onto which personal memory and unresolved identity are inscribed. Extending this inquiry into sculpture, Stephen materializes the instability of the image itself, translating the work into three-dimensional forms that confront the boundaries of a photograph. Her sculptural work treats the image as provisional and fractured, an object always shifting in meaning and never fully resolved. In her photography, gender and femininity are not just subjects but tools. Through color and construction, identity positions are exaggerated, and sometimes destabilized. Her use of theatrical costumes and prosthetics amplifies the absurdity and labor embedded in performing femininity, exposing the tension between social ideals and lived experience. Her images are often stilted and uncanny, revealing how gender is rehearsed, internalized, and sometimes weaponized from an early age. While Stephen’s background is in photography, she uses...

Artwork