Stephanie H. Shih: Open Sundays

Harkawik Gallery is nestled within a piece of the Lower East Side that terminally online media professionals call Dimes Square, and it’s here that Stephanie H. Shih has staged her small exhibition, Open Sundays, featuring ceramic sculptures of food and signage that speak to the neighborhood’s long history as an enclave for Jewish and Chinese communities. Her ceramics include a bottle of soy sauce, a bagel with lox, a bag of frozen dumplings—all small packages that spark joy. In the context of Dimes Square, with its wealthy influencer set stomping up and down Canal Street, these ceramics preserve at a small, domestic scale what is being lost as rents are raised and residents displaced. As joyful as Shih’s individual sculptures may be, their gallery-bound display takes on a strange funerary quality—stripped of any of the communal quality that food, or meals, can evoke, they sit in tomblike silence as visitors gawk at them and gallery attendants stationed behind the front desk silently rearrange the press releases at the desk.