Across one wall, a shelf displays a collection of relationship self-help books, including Divorce for Dummies. On the floor below, a jade-green dustpan cradles the shards of a broken wine glass and its puddling, blood-red ooze. Titled “Dissolution” (all works 2024), this lifesize ceramic sculpture — along with two dozen other everyday objects faithfully depicted in clay — belies the breezy title of Domestic Bliss, ceramic artist Stephanie H. Shih’s solo show at Alexander Berggruen gallery.
The exhibition features a collection of sculptures that depict name-brand, mass-market American products plucked from the shelves of a ’90s collective consciousness, gesturing toward personal betterment with glimpses of turmoil. Each item embodies a tangle of pressures and edicts of diet culture, health and beauty standards, gendered expectations, sex, and consumerism. Shih painstakingly crafted each household object, pharmacy find, and grocery item to match the real-life dimensions and overall feel of the product and packaging. The stories embedded in these charged, chosen objects hint at relationships, conveying clues to hopes and heartbreaks, daydreams and daily concerns.
A forlorn, segmented tray cupping Salisbury steak and sides of mashed potatoes and string beans, for instance, spins endlessly inside a glossy microwave that’s stacked with a trio of TV dinners ready to be “nuked” in “Nuclear Family.” Other food items include a light beer, fat-free cookies, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. A Buns of Steel VHS box set communes with a ThighMaster box promising a way to “squeeze… squeeze your way to a shapely figure.” An unassuming blue-and-white box bears a Viagra label, and a Head & Shoulders bottle hawks a dandruff remedy. A rapturous romance novel, titled Prisoner of My Desire, splayed open on an ironing board beside a Black and Decker Light ‘n Easy iron offers a hot-and-heavy escape from the mundane.
The artist finishes each piece with the attentive detail of handwritten typography. The resulting pop sculpture pairings and tableaux meld an uncanny trompe l’oeil presence with clear evidence of Shih’s hand, rendering the initial factory-made forms imperfect and distinctly emotive, like time capsules of the heart.
Despite the gallery’s hush, long-forgotten soundbites lodged deep in my memory bubble up unbidden as I walk among Shih’s sculptures. In front of the jewel case for Alanis Morrisette’s album Jagged Little Pill (1995), which is paired with an open hardpack of Camels, lyrics from track number four spring to mind: “…I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other one is flickin’ a cigarette.” A Filet-o-Fish sandwich sculpture summons a snippet of a grating chant from a McDonald’s commercial (I’ll spare you that earworm). Regardless of your personal associations or the levels of ’90s nostalgia you harbor for the products Shih put on pedestals in this show, there’s pleasure in seeing commonplace domestic objects rescued from the garbage bin of mass-produced memory and reimagined as art.
An alchemical mutation happens when everyday objects are reinterpreted with such painstaking levels of craft, as seen in works by kindred sculptors, like Liza Lou and Claes Oldenburg (both of whom have also depicted dustpans, food, and everyday objects). Shih’s hand, too, transforms these objects, infusing them with meaning and heart. These sculptures both preserve a moment in time and turn would-be cultural flotsam into something delightful yet wrenching — and utterly human.
Stephanie H. Shih: Domestic Bliss continues at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through February 26. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
