Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, the Vortex, and Within Terror Losing Life - Rebecca J. Stephany, C. 1994 - Set of 2

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Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The Vortex, Within Terror Losing Life
Rebecca J. Stephany, c. 1994

Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The … Read more Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The Vortex, Within Terror Losing Life
Rebecca J. Stephany, c. 1994

Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The Vortex, and Within Terror Losing Life operates as a compact psychological triptych, using small scale not as a compressed state of chaos. Each sculpture measures 4.5 x 4.5 inches and extends roughly 2 inches deep, giving the works the feeling of miniature chambers or emotional reliquaries. Their square wooden supports frame each image like a sealed container, while the dark recessed interiors create the sense that each form has been pressed inward, held, or trapped.

On the left, Within Rage Lunar Lunatic presents a curled figure folded tightly into itself. Rather than depicting rage as outward violence, the work turns rage inward. The body is clenched, protected, and almost stone-like, as if anger has become a physical posture. The “lunar” quality comes through in the pale, cratered surface of the figure, suggesting a body illuminated by harsh internal light or worn down by cycles of emotional intensity.

At the center, The Vortex shifts from figure to force. The body disappears and is replaced by a circular, spiraling mass, making the middle work feel like the emotional engine of the triptych. It reads as both void and movement: a gravitational center that pulls the two surrounding figures into states of contraction. Its placement between the two bodies gives the sequence a narrative structure, as though rage, fear, and psychic disorientation are all orbiting the same destructive center.

On the right, Within Terror Losing Life returns to the body, but this figure feels more depleted than the one on the left. The form is bent over, almost collapsed, with the pale surface pressing against the dark enclosure. If the left sculpture shows a figure bracing against rage, the right suggests a figure being consumed by terror. The title’s phrase “losing life” gives the posture a chilling vulnerability; the body is not simply hiding, but receding.

Together, the three works create a movement from rage, to dissolution, to terror. The repeated square format gives the triptych order and discipline, while the handmade surfaces resist neatness. The exposed wood grain, small fasteners, darkened cavities, and rough sculptural modeling all contribute to the sense that these are not decorative objects but contained emotional states. Their intimacy is essential: they ask the viewer to come close, to look into each small chamber, and to confront emotions that are often too large, too private, or too uncomfortable to name directly.


-Jonathan Flike


About the Artist
Rebecca Stephany is an artist, designer, educator, and researcher whose practice moves fluidly between graphic design, installation, sculpture, video, performance, writing, curating, and printed matter. She has served as Professor for Graphic Design in the Visual Communication Program at Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2021. Stephany studied Art and Graphic Design at the Offenbach University of Art and Design and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, later completing an MFA in Critical Studies at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. She has also received notable research and residency support, including a Rijksakademie Amsterdam scholarship from 2010–2011 and a Designer-in-Residence position at CSS Bard in New York in 2013.

Stephany’s work is difficult to confine to a single discipline, which is central to its importance. Kunsthochschule Kassel describes her practice as one that deliberately moves between commissions and self-initiated projects, using print, installation, video, performance, text, and curatorial work to question the presumed boundaries between “autonomous” and “applied” art. Her work is often driven by feminist criticality, research, archival inquiry, and what she has called an “undisciplined” approach to design and visual culture.

Her 2018 project 200 Sisters Souvenirs is a strong example of this approach. Developed for the 200-year anniversary of Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, the project examined the institution’s catalogue archive from a feminist perspective, transforming archival research into a publication, modified second-hand garments, and souvenir-like objects. Through methods of uncovering, misreading, zooming-in, weaving, and bleach-as-printing, Stephany turned historical material into wearable and usable objects that addressed visibility, erasure, and feminist inheritance.

In Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The Vortex, and Within Terror Losing Life, Stephany’s interest in the body, material meaning, and psychological compression appears in a more intimate sculptural form. Each small wall sculpture operates like a contained emotional chamber, using wood, relief, darkness, and bodily abstraction to explore states of rage, instability, terror, and disappearance. The triptych reflects the same intelligence found across Stephany’s broader practice: an ability to turn objects into carriers of research, feeling, critique, and embodied experience.

Underrepresented Artist Information
Rebecca Stephany’s work matters because it resists the categories that often determine visibility in the art market. She is not easily pinned down as “designer,” “artist,” “educator,” or “researcher,” and that refusal can make her work harder to place within conventional collecting systems. Yet this is precisely where her significance lies. Stephany’s practice questions the hierarchy between applied and autonomous art, between intellectual research and physical object, between feminist critique and visual pleasure.

As a woman working across design, art, education, and feminist research, Stephany’s practice also challenges the historically male-coded idea of the singular artistic genius. In an interview with It’s Nice That, she described her feminist design activism as a refusal of discriminatory narratives around the “star-designer” and an insistence on multiple subjectivities, design principles, and working strategies.

This triptych is especially compelling because it shows a quieter, more collectible side of an artist whose public record is often framed through design, pedagogy, and research-based projects. Within Rage Lunar Lunatic, The Vortex, and Within Terror Losing Life preserves emotional intensity at miniature scale. The works are small, but not slight; they ask for close looking and reward the viewer with a deeply human encounter with fear, rage, collapse, and survival. For Visard, Stephany represents the kind of artist whose importance becomes clearer when the boundaries around art, design, objecthood, and authorship are allowed to loosen. See less