Stephanie Temma Hier

Intrusions by Stephanie Temma Hier manifests as a visual and material disruption that evokes memory and nostalgia. Through this exhibition on view at Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique, Hier employs bold imagery, rich materials, and striking color to provoke the imagination.

Hier's fusion of ceramic sculpture and meticulous painting draws on found imagery from cookbooks, fashion and nature magazines, stock photos, and personal photographs. By extracting these images from their original context, she creates a pastiche of memorabilia that resonates deeply with anyone who engages with her work. Hier breathes new life into these icons—many of which were once discarded or forgotten—reincarnating their significance within her artworks.

It is through the evocation of memory that these pieces function as ‘intrusions'. The sources she draws from reflect the aesthetics of domesticity and interior life from the recent past, particularly the 1980's and '90s. Hier appears to upend the Martha Stewart-style ideals of domestic femininity from that era, reimagining these aesthetics through a contemporary, 21st-century lens. Psychologically driven, Hier creates tension by fusing the mundane with the uncanny. The sentimental and quotidian nature of her subjects is central to the artist's exploration, as she both cherishes and subverts them, imbuing them with entirely new surrealist energies. Recurring themes in her work include food, animals, fragmented bodies, dollhouses, clocks, and other symbols of childhood and domestic life. Each piece in Intrusions presents a material interruption, inviting the viewer to look deeper, think differently, and revel in the playfulness the artist creates—whether it is seductive and exuberant or slightly more sinister.

This duality is exemplified in Bring me the sunset in a cup, where a hand emerges holding a broken sculpture, and in Smothered, which depicts blood-red syrup pouring over a stack of pancakes and spilling onto a woman's skirt. In both works, the female figures are partially absent from the frame. They intrude only to convey meaning, crossing the boundaries of the painting or ceramic object to make their presence felt.

Sensuality and eroticism are key elements in Hier's practice, whether it's the depiction of a woman's red-lipped mouth with a flower between her teeth, or that of unfurling cabbage leaves.

The intricate balance between nature and culture are also explored in this body of work, as patterns of the natural world are pilfered, transformed and flattened such as in the leopard print and honeycomb in Bring me the sunset in a cup. Here, the natural and manmade worlds collide, further blurring the boundaries between artifice and wilderness. Hier is holding up a mirror to how these universes intrude into one another, disrupting the constructed separation we often perceive there to be.

The dualities within Hier's intrusions are also evident in her material choices. The use of handcrafted ceramics offers a double-entendre: a natural, malleable material used to represent other organic substances, such as food. Once fired and solidified, these ceramics, combined with carefully rendered paintings, become fixed objects that exist outside of the time and context in which the original references were conceived. The transition from fluid to solid form reflects the fragmented bodies that appear and disappear throughout Hier's work—becoming entirely objectified and removed from their original, organic state.