See This: Household Objects of the ’90s, Recreated in Clay
As published in the T List of The New York TImes, January 23, 2025
Artist Stephanie Shih conjures a poignant domestic drama by recreating the symbols of temptation, vice, convenience and self-improvement that defined American life in the 1990s.Credit...© Stephanie H. Shih, Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo: Robert Bredvad
In “Domestic Bliss,” a tenderly realized portrait of American life in the 1990s at Alexander Berggruen gallery in New York, the artist Stephanie Shih draws us into a fraught family narrative. The ceramic objects on view play various roles in the interior drama: Cigarette butts and a crushed beer can signal temptations acquiesced to; the complete “Buns of Steel” workout series on VHS and Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster offer proof of an investment in personal improvement. Viagra tablets point to lust, perhaps hope. Frozen dinners — one for each member of the titular “Nuclear Family” — sit atop a white Panasonic microwave oven, suggesting an uneasy coexistence. On an ironing board, an iron keeps company with the paperback bodice-ripper “Prisoner of My Desire.” The book that inspired this body of work? 1998’s “Divorce for Dummies,” which Shih has rendered here as part of a self-help library. The artist builds the pieces by hand, using a fine brush to decorate their surfaces. There are subtle signs that each object is handmade, evoking the crafted pop sensibility of Corita Kent or Liza Lou — a slightly dappled finish here, a hint of hand lettering there. The net result is the uncanny feeling that the whole room has been seen, recorded, lost, then lovingly recreated, each element conjured by a human being with a memory that aches. “Stephanie H. Shih: Domestic Bliss” is on view at Alexander Berggruen, New York, from Jan. 22 through Feb. 26, alexanderberggruen.com.