Porcelain Perfect - Page 2

"Shalene's works have a decidedly feminist and a slightly militant look that I adore," Henderson says, "with figures you would find on a McCall's [magazine] pattern. I'm 70, and her works show what women looked like, acted like, did their hair like when I was a teenager in the '60s and '70s."

There's a complexity to Shalene's art that is not seen in all trompe l'oeil ceramics. Often once we understand that, hey, what looks like a stack of logs is actually clay, the joke quickly wears off.

Shalene does more than play with one substance substituting for another. Her work trumps not just the eye but the mind.

If Shalene really wanted to fool us into thinking her ceramic corsets and potholders were made of fabric, why would she complicate the effect by painting strange narratives on top of them?

Instead, the objects become part of her stories. Her phone series, for example, is about people communicating, whether successfully or not.

And the women that Shalene paints, are they real women as they existed in the mid-century or, as Shalene suggests, satirical images of the perfect woman as created by 'Mad Men'-era advertising execs?

"You look at, like, old '50s and '60s advertisements," Shalene says, "most models have pretty much the same bodies, all kind of have the same figure, the same style."

That explains, she says, why her art focuses on a narrow range of the feminine form and does not include women of color or of a certain age. Shalene, who says she is "a person who is from part Mexican heritage," is intrigued in the way the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was "whitewashed" for so long, "how certain immigrants blend in and others stand out" from the general culture, and "the discrimination those [immigrants] face."

"So my work subtly explores that and, yeah, these women all have the same exact skin color. I mean, that's a little alarming, isn't it?"

Indeed, Shalene's women appear as if they were formed in a Madison Avenue mold to create the perfect wife, much as Shalene's clay creations are formed in her hand-built plaster molds.

But what really trumps the mind is how Shalene's technique of slip cast molding matches the tale her art tells. Could this have something to do with women breaking out of molds as second-wave feminism came to the fore in the 1960s, with its focus on the sins of the patriarchy, women's entrapment in the home, and with raising women's consciousness?

"The reason I work with clay relates to the imagery I work with," she says. "There's that discovery where people go up to an object thinking that it's an actual toaster, or phone, or it's a potholder, and it should be soft. Then there's that moment of discovery that it isn't what it initially seemed to be.

"I do that with the imagery as well. From afar you'll see these cookie-cutter women with the same color skin, with the bright-red lipstick, the repetitive, attractive women you'd see in glossy advertisements from like the '60s. But when you get closer and start seeing the things going on, the narratives and the interactions, then you make new discoveries about the piece."

The ads from the mid-century that often serve as inspiration showed "how glamorous and how beautiful and how glossy everything was," Shalene says. "But, you know, it was a very conflicted time for sure."