Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Palate Cleanser, our first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Stephanie Temma Hier. Fifteen paintings and two sculptures will be on view from November 13 – December 18, 2021.
Hier works in oil paint and ceramic to playfully represent objects and subjects of consumption. Fragments of human and animal bodies are juxtaposed with the objects they ingest, from food to facial orifices and footwear, asking viewers to linger over our peculiarly complicated visual and affective relationships with them. But the works in Palate Cleanser do more to spoil appetites than to whet them, as Hier’s absurdist compositional logic creates visceral associations between entities that do not normally belong together. This sense of unbelonging sensitizes viewers to the discomfiting features of embodiment and is achieved through the technique of defamiliarization. For instance: a snail, a mushroom, and subway sandwiches collide in Footlong Fantasy; salmon steaks and sneakers sensually intertwine in Often Seen at Sunset; and gummy bears, strawberries, and raw, butchered meat proliferate in Sparks and Tremors. Palate Cleanser captures viewers in its perversion-through-juxtaposition: Hier’s remediation of images is at once sumptuous and grotesque, intuitively comprehensible yet uncongenial to familiar feelings.
The works in Palate Cleanser testify to Hier’s virtuosic talent, which is complemented by a do-it-yourself gusto. The artist handcrafts almost all materials that comprise her final works—she engineers her stretcher bars, constructs her “frames” made up of ceramic sculpture, and creates her own glazes. Though she is a trained painter, having studied at the Academy of Art Canada and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and a self-taught ceramicist, having taken up the practice only in recent years, the artist’s process begins with and is shaped by the latter practice. Hier begins each work by constructing the ceramics, embracing the quirks formed by the volatility of the kiln along the way. Some of her glazes bubble and foam in the kiln, producing a matte surface that is rippled with circular ditches like magma, coral, or a craterous moon. Other glazes shine, giving a liquid-like effect with streaks of disparate color throughout. Her works are dependent upon the physicality of the imperfect ceramic, which indexes human touch. Once Hier has made her ceramics to completion, she installs them on the wall around a blank canvas. She then begins to draw sketches to plan out the composition of a painting, referring to images she has taken or has sourced from the internet. This process is slow and considered; between ideation, sculpting, firing, painting, and drying, works can take months to complete.
Hier’s realist oil paintings recall seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Vanitas paintings, which depict congested still-lives filled with luxury goods, from pearls and tableware to food and skulls. These still lives, like Hier’s oil paintings, are rendered meticulously, with particular attention paid to the sensory evocations of texture. Also akin to Hier’s works, Vanitas paintings are less about abundance and delectation, and more about the inevitable decay of all material matter. But the somber moralism of this genre explodes in Hier’s hands, which instead generate a regime of images that are closer to Videodrome than to Vanitas. All of the paintings in the show are encased in irregular, sometimes bodily ceramic sculpture. These sculptures contain, overwhelm, and entrap the paintings as much as—probably more than—they frame them.
Palate Cleanser is charged with the question of how a thing, wrested from its conventional context and use, will acquire a new meaning. “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see,” wrote Anaïs Nin in The Novel of the Future. Here, Nin articulates a basic feature of human psychology: our ability to form archetypal mental “images” of certain objects and scenarios. This process marks both an advantage and a loss, as it allows us to think quickly while also engendering a selective blindness that prevents us from perceiving the richness and specificity of all we encounter. Hier works in the domain of Nin’s “familiar” objects: a glass perfume bottle, a cut of steak, a table setting, a sneaker, a ceramic vase, a corkscrew, a snail. She juxtaposes such objects, rendered in oil paint and ceramic, within her works, performing a semantic scrambling of the visual world. This aesthetic logic was foundational to defamiliarization, a primary artistic technique of the 20th century Russian avant-garde. Defamiliarization had not only an affective function of surprise, play, and intrigue, but also a political one: its first articulator, Viktor Shklovsky, understood it as a way to combat the “over-automatization” of individuals, which causes them to “function as though by formula.” Shlovsky and his contemporaries sought to cultivate a deep attention in viewers and readers of their work, forced to think about how the meaning of various objects and fragments shift depending on how they are juxtaposed with other objects and fragments. The works in Palate Cleanser provoke Shlovsky’s ideal mode of viewership, as they initially capture viewers due to their compositional strangeness, beauty, and boldness, but linger on issues surrounding the porousness of the body, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion evoked by food, and the potential for great horror if and when one consumes the wrong thing.
The process by which Hier decides which objects to represent may not be commonplace, but it is not random. Hers is an art sensitized to the intuitive linkage between seemingly disparate things. For instance, in Dedicated To The One I Love, a bouquet of fish interspersed with cocktail onion and tomato skewers frames an oil painting depicting a tender hand massage. Among other questions, Dedicated To The One I Love seems to impishly ask: when does a body become meat? The grotesque potential of ‘meatiness’ – of food – is defined by the dissolution of boundaries between inside and outside, consumer and consumption.
In Endless Red Tongue, a serpent coils around itself. Tucked between the glistening blood red and royal blue scales of its body, its head pokes through. In the center of the oil painting, two eyes, black as night, stare at the viewer. The painting is framed by a series of circular, craterous stoneware sculptures, glazed with red dye. Contextualized by the show as a whole, this painting recalls the most famous story of a serpent, in which the devil, transfigured as a serpent, entices Eve with a juicy, ripe apple. Eve bites the forbidden fruit, tempting Adam with it in turn. Man is forever marked by disobedience. In the story, what is desirable, nourishing, and necessary to the body is also what brings to it the possibility of negativity—of greed, rot, sin. That double-edged sword of attraction and repulsion, ingestion and grotesquery, delicacy and perishability is intimately felt in all of the works on view in Palate Cleanser.
Stephanie Hier (B. 1992, Toronto, Canada; Lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.) holds a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University. She has had solo shows with Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Franz Kaka, Miami; Y2K Group, New York; David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Downs and Ross, New York; NEOCHROME, New York; NEOCHROME, Turin; and Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York.