“It’s the wreckage and wreckage of everyday life,” Stephanie Temma said yesterday, describing the decadent visual contrasts that characterize her work. His works combine three-dimensional ceramic sculptures made in a veritable cluster of shapes – lobsters, teeth, horses – which frame his brilliant and meticulous oil paintings, providing an eerie visual tension.

In the backyard of her Brooklyn studio, Hier points to a pile of three car tires she found in the industrial district. She uses them as molds for a new ongoing series of ceramic tires that will form a sculptural installation for an upcoming exhibition with Montreal’s Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery. Some of the tires will contain paint in their hubs. “Other items will be draped over it, I guess. Some ceramic fish or flowers. Maybe an old teddy bear,” she mused. “There’s going to be 30 or 40 ceramic tires.”

Stephanie Temma Yesterday and her new oven, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

She patted the pile of tires with one hand. “I love the repetition,” she said, noting that this will be her biggest installation yet.

For Toronto-born Hier (b. 1992), paint and ceramic elements have equal weight in shaping her witty, surreal and sometimes disturbing paintings. These unique creations have earned the artist a devoted collector. Last May, her works stood out at Independent with Bradley Ertaskiran, where she is preparing a solo exhibition this fall. She also recently completed a solo exhibition”This must be the place” on the Brussels site of the Nino Mier Gallery this spring. She also has an exhibition with Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai on the horizon.

With so much in the mix, Yesterday is abuzz with new ideas as she moved around her studio with palpable enthusiasm and a sharp wit. “The studio seems pretty empty after the show in Brussels, but I quickly fill the space,” she said with a laugh.

Material Girl Meets a Mad Scientist

Stepping through the doors of Hier’s ground floor workshop, one is greeted first by his dog Daphne, then by a gigantic gleaming stainless steel oven that looks like what could be a huge floor-level refrigerator. foot. Genesis, the oven’s brand name, is engraved on one side, evoking the biblical creation of Adam from clay, as the oven is larger than human scale. “This is a major upgrade from the oven I’ve been using for years and years,” Hier explained, pointing to his old overshadowed oven next to it. “It was a very intense process. These ovens are rare. It took six months to make, and it requires an incredible amount of power.

Stéphanie Temma Hier and her dog Daphné. Courtesy of the artist.

It designates a tangle of threads. “It’s a learning process,” she says. Hier is a self-taught ceramist. She trained as a painter at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, but after years of painting, an interest in ceramics naturally emerged. She learned by trial and error. “I don’t have a mentor I can call on to guide me,” she said, looking down at the towering Genesis. “I say I’m self-taught, but I’m on a lot of internet forums about ceramics. I would say that I am an internet-trained ceramicist.

Courtesy of Stéphanie Temma Hier.

On shelves beyond the oven, a few ceramic frames laden with roses are drying. She removes the plastic that protects them. “Everything I make is made by hand. It’s very tactile, interlocking those elements together,” she said. Ceramics, explained Yesterday, must be created before his paintings can begin. “I custom make the canvases to fit perfectly, so I can’t actually start painting until the ceramic is done because the clay shrinks a bit,” she noted.

A ceramic in the shape of a beach ball hangs on the wall, a circle in its empty center, where Hier will add a canvas in the shape of a tondo. “Coming from a background in painting – and I’m certainly not the first person to say this – painting has a lot of baggage that can be confining. I like to flip the narrative and let the artful sculpture dictate the terms of the painting. It’s a satisfying process for me.

Stephanie Temma Yesterday, hide and seek (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Vacancy Gallery.

Material freedom is what keeps her in suspense. “I’m a big fan of materials,” Hier confessed, looking around the studio and a shelf full of clear plastic containers filled with ceramic pigments. “I can be a bit of a mad scientist with them,” she said, pulling out a notebook full of handwritten homemade frosting recipes. The enamels, which look like mud in their plastic containers, transform when fired to produce unique effects.

“There is a push and pull between control and release, letting the work do its own thing. The painting is so direct. You make a mark and it’s there. That does not change,” considered Yesterday. “With ceramic and enameling, no matter how many tests you do, you can never really control the process. What happens in the kiln is very organic. Every time I open the kiln it is like Christmas morning. I am always surprised.

Domestic consumption and Dead Horse Bay

When Hier moved to New York a decade ago, she was living in an apartment in Long Island City with a fascinating neighbor, an older musician who happened to be a longtime friend of David Byrne and Brian Eno of Talking Head (who had each spent residential time in the building). “He had all these unreleased music tapes that they had been experimenting with,” she said. “I was always trying to get invited for a beer, hoping to see what he had, but that never happened.”

Stéphanie Temma Hier and her dog Daphné.

Hier’s recent exhibition, “This Must Be the Place”, at Nino Mier’s house is a nod to the Talking Heads as well as his memories of this former apartment. “Galleries in Brussels are in townhouses, so I was playing with that side of my work – intimate personal domestic themes.” For this exhibition, Hier incorporated found objects into his work for the first time, transforming vintage pokers, disassembling them and adding ceramic teeth. She exhibits these sculptures next to the fireplaces of the gallery. The show also included a mural of oversized plates, each with three-dimensional fish and bones surrounding tondo oil paintings of men struggling, with a homoerotic cadence. An iron, a turkey, and washing-up gloves all make an appearance. In one work, a horse’s body forms a frame surrounding a grid of painted mouths – these expressions included a mix of screaming politicians or people in orgasm – his ironic play on the tradition of equestrian portraiture. But the highlight of the exhibition was a ceramic dollhouse. In the gallery, we recognize miniature representations of several sculptures installed around the small rooms, a meta-artistic visual experience. But in what appears to be an upstairs bedroom, a man falls asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand, the sheets catching fire. As with many of Yesterday’s works, tension rises between comedy and tragedy.

Courtesy of Stéphanie Temma Hier.

Yesterday, who grew up in a bourgeois family (his mother is a dietician), immersed himself in the language of Western consumption and waste, but in the blink of an eye, even in a whimsical way. “I keep my working process very free. I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and the visceral reaction you have to things that don’t necessarily go together,” she explained.

She gets these images on the Internet, in books and in thrift stores. “I also use a lot of vintage cookbooks and printed images. I’m attracted to images or symbols that have meaning and can be interpreted in different ways. When I incorporate them into the lexicon of my work, they bring that meaning with them,” she said.

One particular place that inspires him is Dead Horse Bay, a strip of marshland in Queens, New York, not far from the trendy Rockaway Beach strip. Once home to a 19th-century glue factory (hence the bay’s name), the land is a wasteland of abandoned factory detritus. “It’s emblematic of the town that’s been abandoned,” she said. “You can drive there and collect glass and ceramics, bones, lots of weird little collections. Go ahead and tell me what you found. I like to hear what other people find out,” she said.

Stephanie Temma Yesterday, dolls house (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Nino Mier Gallery.

A work in progress for his fall exhibit is a large picnic blanket. Yesterday encourages me to touch the still wet clay to feel its still moving potential. She covered the tasselled blanket with plates and bowls, bones and ants. She scattered all sorts of other trash there. She notes the implications of the art history of the picnic, evoking the story of Manet Lunch on the Grass, Kerry James Marshall, a Roman feast – but how they balance with a kind of 1960s dream world, leisure performance. “I love theatre,” she said. “Art can be so painfully serious. Sometimes we need a step back, a little levity. I want to do work that I feel is important, but also, sometimes work can be appreciated, i.e. pleasant.”

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