Drawing from high-end European fashion magazines, Vikky Alexander’s early experiments with rephotography are key examples of 1980s appropriation. Unlike Richard Prince, whose work often examines tropes of masculinity, Alexander is interested in how women view other women. The source for St. Sebastian is an image of a reclining female model—glistening with perspiration and wearing a strapless black bathing suit—that Alexander photographed from a fashion magazine using a 35mm camera and a simple copy stand.

In the 1970s Richard Prince worked for Time Inc., clipping magazine articles for the writers’ archive. Enthralled with the advertisements for luxury goods such as watches, liquor, purses, and cigarettes, he began to rephotograph them with his own camera, distancing them from their original purposes and recasting them as “high art.” Prince’s pioneering use of appropriated images has made him the artist most associated with the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists interested in originality, authorship, and the construction of images.

This is a recording of a live performance Martha Rosler did for public-access television in 1982. She sits at a short table that holds two mirrors and makeup, with the December 1982 issue of Vogue in her lap. As she flips through the pages, she runs her fingers across images, circling the models and asking them questions. Her critique shifts from how the magazine is meant to be consumed by the reader to details of its production, such as circulation numbers, international editions, and advertising prices.

The title of this exhibition, Objects of Desire, draws inspiration from Sarah Charlesworth’s series of the same name, made between 1983 and 1989. To make these works, Charlesworth clipped out images from fashion and martial-arts magazines, natural-history periodicals, and pornography, isolating the cutouts on fields of color and rephotographing the scenes as single objects. These works were realized large and in glossy color, revealing Charlesworth’s affinity for commercial aesthetics.

Since the late 1970s, Frank Majore has meticulously assembled luscious color photographs that exploit the language of corporate advertising. Happy features a studio-based assembly of champagne-filled glass flutes placed against projected patterns that simulate colorful paned windows. Floating across the bottom left is the ethereal image of a pale woman (appropriated from a beauty-product television advertisement) with closed eyes who emits a gentle laugh. Majore is interested in how advertisers control viewers and spur consumption through the manipulation of feminine beauty.

Sara Cwynar made this video two years after rose gold was first introduced as an iPhone color. Juxtaposing images of consumer products with philosophy texts read by a male voice (occasionally punctuated by a female voice), Rose Gold is a meditation on the importance and emotional impact of color. In particular, Cwynar looks at how color is used to transform an existing product and sell it as if it is something new, to re-stimulate desire for and interest in the object.

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.