Elad Lassry’s works behave like product shots, deploying many commercial strategies: sumptuous color, frontal views, and print sizes that mimic magazine pages. Lassry turns the familiar relationship of advertising on its head by presenting the art object as the ultimate product. These photographs do not point to something else outside of the frame; they are in themselves the objects of desire.

Ericka Beckman based Spoonful on a 1960s cereal commercial that features hand-constructed props and do-it-yourself practical effects. Though the original was meant to appeal to children during Saturday-morning cartoons, Beckman’s scene is frenetic, comical, and nightmarish in its exaggeration.

Jo Ann Callis made the multi-image work Cheap Thrills and Forbidden Pleasures nearly fifteen years after producing her first color photograph. She knew she was treading on artistically dangerous territory: color photographic work was still linked to commercial imagery. As an artist, she felt that her work was at times met with skepticism because it was so lush, alluring, and beautiful.

In New York in the 1970s, many artists made a living shooting stock images. Sandy Skoglund taught herself how to take product photographs, mastering the 4×5-inch camera, studio lighting, and Cibachrome printmaking, which she learned from a do-it-yourself kit. She used these new skills to challenge the class system that pitted mass culture against “high art” by making the type of work seen in these two photographs: images of processed foods on synthetic backgrounds, all in saturated hypercolor.

You may notice some differences between this space and LACMA’s other galleries. Next time you visit this exhibition, you may see subtle shifts in the design. This is because LACMA has partnered with the Neuroscience Lab of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego to develop an innovative research project to understand how exhibition design can enhance visitor experience. All museum visitor data collected as part of this research will be anonymized.

Here, Julia Kunin evokes amphibious environments with slip-cast rocks and snails submerged in pooled, iridescent glaze. She has long been inspired by the macabre tradition of casting once-living specimens pioneered by French Renaissance polymath Bernard Palissy and widely elaborated over the centuries. For this body of work, she was also entranced by images of the historical iridescent ceramics produced by the internationally acclaimed Zsolnay ceramics manufactory in Hungary.

Elite Europeans collected elaborate, domestically-produced vessels that imitated the look of luxury imported blue-and-white porcelain from Asia. For example, this crowned English posset pot is adorned with faux Chinese scenery. In Trophy Wife, Elyse Pignolet relates the collecting of prized ceramics to the objectification of desirable women. Her sculpture lures viewers with the pretty and familiar Asian-inspired motifs of blue-and-white pottery, only to confront them with equally ubiquitous misogynistic stereotypes.

Refined jars painted with regal dragons made in government-controlled kilns held wine or flowers during Joseon court rituals. The Chicago-born son of Korean immigrants, Steven Young Lee first learned Asian ceramic techniques in a Western education system, studying vessels like this one in books and museum collections. His reinterpretation of a ceremonial jar challenges traditional standards of perfection, elevating and exaggerating defects like drips and cracks.

Having perfected the technique of printing detailed scenes onto ceramics, potteries in England’s industrial heartland created products for an expanding consumer base in the United States. Appealing to American interests, they depicted patriotic landscapes and commemorated newsworthy tragedies like the 1835 Great Fire of New York City. The First Amendment plate memorializing newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802–37) championed the Abolitionist cause for which he was killed.