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.

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.