The Looking Glass Gallery

Bree Mercado is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, belonging, and self-perception through a deeply personal and community-rooted lens. Drawing from lived experience as a queer, BIPOC artist, Bree creates paintings and mixed media works that invite softness, emotional honesty, and reflection.

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This exhibition features works from Women & Agency, a collection that centers women of color across diverse shapes, sizes, and expressions—depicted fully owning their bodies, minds, and presence. The collection examines agency as both an internal truth and a societal negotiation, redefining the ever-evolving feminine gaze while engaging with the emotional identities women are often assigned, expected to perform, or choose to embody. Through abstraction, color, and the body as a central motif, the work honors self-acceptance, autonomy, and the power of embodied self-definition.

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Much of this body of work leans into intuitive mark-making and layered textures, using the figure as a site of memory, resilience, and reclamation. These pieces hold space for vulnerability while affirming joy, healing, and visibility—particularly within LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities.

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As the inaugural exhibition at Looking Glass Gallery, Women & Agency sets the tone for the space itself: reflective, accessible, and rooted in care. It is an invitation to slow down, look inward, and see yourself—fully and unapologetically—reflected back.