Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of What the Mirror Said, a solo exhibition of collages by Lanecia A. Rouse. The exhibition opens on Friday, January 10, 2025 at our Main Street location with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through March 7.
What the Mirror Said is an intimate cartography of becoming—a visual exploration of identity where memory assembles itself like a living collage. Here, fragments do not merely coexist; they breathe, dissolve, and reconstruct themselves, mirroring the fluid nature of self-understanding. In contemplating the mirror’s message as a daily embodiment practice, the artist includes her own likeness into some of the work for the first time.
Water moves through these works as both medium and metaphor—eroding boundaries, revealing hidden landscapes of experience. Each piece becomes a threshold, a portal where past and present exchange whispers, where the inner child speaks in layers of color and texture.
Guided by the ancestral wisdom of Black authors—Lucille Clifton, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Natasha Trethewey, Carvell Wallace and James Baldwin—these visual poems pulse with a quiet, revolutionary tenderness. They have no interest in resolution but simply seek to witness: to hold space for complexity, for the sacred act of becoming.
Echoing Lucille Clifton’s profound words:
i continue to continue
where i have been
most of my lives is
where I’m going
These works are an affirmation—looking before, looking beneath, ever-transforming, carrying on . . .
A word from the Artist
Art-making, for me, is an act imbued with love—an exploration of the self, life and the world we inhabit and create. At its heart, my practice revolves around the intricate processes of memory and re-memory, capturing the ephemeral nature of personal and collective histories. Through the medium of collage, I gather fragments of the past—images, textures, and materials—into visual poems that explore the interplay between what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is, what is imagined and what exists in the spaces between.
These works are portals, thresholds that toggle between the past, present, and future, reflecting on themes of identity, womanhood, and self-actualization. Each piece serves as a dialogue between temporal layers, asking questions about how we shape and are shaped by the moments and stories we carry.
At its core, in my art I strive to illuminate the transient beauty of memory and its capacity to hold both loss and possibility. In exploring the tension between fragmentation and wholeness, I seek to uncover the connective threads that bind us to ourselves and one another. My work invites viewers to pause, reflect, and engage with their own narratives, to consider the hidden
About the Artist
Lanecia A. Rouse is a versatile artist based in both Richmond, VA, and Houston, TX. Her diverse portfolio encompasses collage, abstract painting, photography, teaching, writing, speaking, and curatorial projects for local non-profit organizations. Her current collage work incorporates appropriated images from vintage Ebony Magazines, the Library of Congress archive, discarded magazines and her own photography and family photo archive.
Lanecia has taught workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Shakerag Workshops, and The Glen Workshop. She has participated in several residencies, including the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts in Charleston, SC (2023); the Artists on Site: Series 3 Artist-in-Residence at the Asia Society HTX (2022); and the 2020–2021 Artist-in-Residence for the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) at Rice University. Currently, she is the Artist-in-Residence partner at Holy Family HTX Episcopal Church in Houston, TX, where she leads the curation team for the Lanecia A. Rouse Gallery. Additionally, she serves on the Board of Directors for Image Journal.
Lanecia’s work was recently featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, from September to December 2023, before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
