July 2025
Amy Stober
Hilton Als. Photo by Ali Smith
Merging autobiography with mass culture, Amy Stober uses polyurethane to effectively translate the forms of ephemeral, personal keepsakes into permanent, collective artifacts. She embeds public narratives within private objects, such as wicker umbrellas, handbags, and plush dolls, by adorning them with family photographs, girlhood symbols, and New York iconography.
Looking at her cast sculptures is an invitation to contemplate how familiar objects can become vessels of oneself and relics of a bygone era. However, a tacit tension exists within her work that raises a key question: Are these objects being preserved, mourned, or transformed?
Interview by Almog Cohen-Kashi
Amy Stober: I have a love-hate relationship with nostalgia.
Almog Cohen-Kashi: What do you love about it, and what do you hate? I've always felt that in your work, nostalgia operates as a tool. It becomes a point of access or language legible to a specific audience. I use the word 'specific' because not everyone is going to be nostalgic in the same way as you.
AS: I feel like nostalgia implies a sense of longing and carries sentimentality. I'm embarrassed to align myself with nostalgia because it feels so indulgent. I don't dislike sentimentality; I am sentimental. I think my relationship to replicating dolls, clothes, and handbags is an assertion of sentimentality. However, the larger cultural idea of nostalgia is something I don't want to be lumped into because it would make my work too one-note or one-dimensional. My sculptures have more nuance.
My use of nostalgia feels less like yearning and more like a type of study—a study of origins, a study of self, and a study of place. My work is more about processing visual signifiers from a specific moment that became foundational to my sense of self. I'm interested in the ways it can also relate to my generational relationships, for example, my grandma taught me how to knit, and I was thinking about that when I made Tulip, a cast sculpture of a hand-knit bag.
I've always been interested in the things that constructed my visual world and the way this world was shaped without me even realizing it. I grew up inside someone else's taste, which can be understood as a sort of inheritance. Now I have strong memories and emotions tied to certain textures, objects, or colors, even if they're objectively ordinary. That's why I keep returning to things from my childhood and early adolescence, which was between the years 1998–2006, in my work, not because I'm intent on reproducing them, but because I want to understand the hold they have on me. It's led me to question what are we carrying that we didn't choose? What part of our visual identity was built for us before we had the language to describe it? What happens when we take those inherited forms and remake them in our own hands, with our own logic?
My relationship to my identity feels both inherited and constructed. I think that's what fascinates me about gendered signs. I'm working through my definition of femininity in a lot of my sculptures. Like in A&F, which has cutesy polka dots that read as very feminine while also touching on the convention of ornamentation, which is attached to domestic craft labor. That's another angle that interests me: the handmade and referencing things that are explicitly more craft-oriented, like knitting or wicker. I'm just so endlessly interested in objects and how we use them as extensions and representations of ourselves. While I was making A&F, I was thinking about John Hughes movies and Molly Ringwald. Specifically, the set dressing of her bedrooms in Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. That was a very mainstream representation of what a teenage girl's room looked like. Her characters' rooms had white wicker furniture, hanging baubles, ribbons, and plush figures. I wanted to channel that sort of idea of feminine suburban domesticity in the white wicker for A&F.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: You're thinking about a very specific type of femininity. How do you define femininity, and also what are your touchstones?
AS: I think the femininity I’m referencing stems mostly from things that are foundational to my personal experience. Growing up, my mom decorated my bedroom in this very quintessential way. There were lace curtains, hardwood furniture with cast roses as handles, and wallpaper lining the ceiling that had lace, roses, and ribbon. And my birthday being on Valentine's Day feels like a visual inundation that adds to my stylistic Pangaea. As present and foundational as these things were to how I constructed my identity, I also intentionally rejected them as soon as I gained a sense of autonomy at around age 8 or 9. I remember I ripped down that wallpaper and took down the lace. The walls of my room were bare and I put up an Avril Lavigne poster. That felt like a very real moment for me.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
“Curation is storytelling. And most curators, if they’re interesting, have a great interest or impulse to communicate something narratively.”
ACK: Do you see that ripped-up wallpaper and the Avril Lavigne poster in any of your work?
AS: Honestly, that’s something I think about. I want to reach that point, but I'm not sure if I have yet. I stayed in my childhood home in New Jersey during the summer of 2023, when I moved from Baltimore to New York. That was a transitional period in my life. It was six months before I began working on my exhibition at PAGE (NYC). During this time, I was responding to a lot of new and old things in my life while reflecting on the reality of being in my childhood home.
The interior of my bedroom changed throughout the years. I didn’t have the Avril Lavigne poster anymore, but the walls were still bare when I came back in 2023. I honestly couldn’t even see the walls because there were stacks of boxes that went up nearly to the ceiling. What was once my room became a non-space that encouraged me to think about all the other versions of my room that existed before. Making the work for the Page show became a reflection of who I was. My sculpture Girl, which I made during that time, feels like a self-portrait of who I was at the age of 12. The pink and green stripes remind me of a shirt I was obsessed with and continuously wore. It feels like an homage to the memory of my childhood bedroom.
I also wanted to make more composite objects around the time of the Page show. An early example is When It Rains, It Pours, which is a cast replica of a little, plush, Groovy Girl doll that has an umbrella coming out of her head.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: What did it say on the rim of the umbrella?
AS: It said, “When it rains, it pours.” I thought it was very sweet.
ACK: Did you make the umbrella part too?
AS: No, I didn't. It was a found object.
ACK: Do you see a tension between found and crafted objects in your work?
AS: I don't often. That's something I'm just starting to think about. There’s something important to me about touching and transforming the object. There are small changes that happen when you create a mold of something. In Good Luck Charm, it looks like there are pennies all over the sculpture, but if you really look at it, they aren’t actual pennies. They’re cast replicas of pennies. I like creating these approximations because it lets the sculpture hold this weird space as an object. I feel like that uncanniness is something I'm drawn to.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: Why are you drawn to it?
AS: I like the illusionism of it, or like the trick. I think it encourages people to spend more time with the object, which I like. They become more curious, strange, and not as immediately understood.
ACK: There's also a small sense of mystery in your work that creates that kind of hold you described, that makes people want to spend more time with your sculptures. I feel it when I look at your bags that are facing the wall, like Girl Gaze. When you look at that sculpture, you see the bottom, which has a figurative painting, but you don't see what's inside the bag. They're sculptural objects, but they're also paintings.
AS: Yes, that work exists in this sort of in-between space. That series engaged with my background, which is more formally rooted in painting.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: So you studied initially to be a painter, and then you moved into sculpture. How did that happen?
AS: I found that a lot of my references when painting were coming from objects, specifically clothing. I was working a lot with textiles, patterning, and texture. Eventually, when I was in school at MICA, I started making a lot of tactile paintings, and then that transitioned into a desire to replicate the objects themselves and use their forms within the compositions. I first started by making molds of belts that felt more like approximations, where my hand was present and obvious. But I liked the structure of replicating objects in a more exact, one-to-one way and letting my hand be present in other places of the work. It leads to a more controlled execution.
ACK: Why do you feel the need to remake or recast these objects rather than using assemblage techniques where you could simply put the literal object on top of your painting?
AS: By remaking the object, I’m asserting my relationship with it. In a way, it’s also about spending time with these forms so I can dismantle them and superimpose a new relationship onto them. It feels like I’m embedding myself into the things that helped shape me, which is important to me.
ACK: Why is it important to you? Also, I would love to hear more about why you are choosing to cast these specific objects.
AS: The objects I cast are typically clothes, dolls, or domestic ephemera that I would have had in my early childhood or as a preteen. It was a time in my life when I was surrounded by things my mom picked for me that became formative to my identity. But I kind of got upset about how much her influence shaped me, and by the time I turned 8 or 9, I tried to distance myself from her taste. I have a great relationship with my mom, and I love her very much. She just had a very specific and traditional idea of how a little girl should dress that I rebelled against when I was in middle school. Instead, I was wearing only t-shirts and ripped jeans or my brother's clothes. And then I feel like when I hit puberty, that's when all these sorts of girlier visual cues came back into my life, and I was like, ‘okay, now I think I want to engage with this.’
Growing up, I was deeply averse to anything that felt specifically feminine. It always made me feel like a character when I was engaging with that stuff. Now it’s funny because I think about my sculptures as operating in terms of characters or archetypes. It makes my sculptures digestible and easily understood on a surface level. That can create a closeness or a sense of distance, depending on the person.
ACK: What are some of the characteristics and archetypes you're thinking about?
AS: Recently, I've been intentionally watching a bunch of manic pixie dreamgirl movies. I'm pretty quirked-up if I’m being honest. Sometimes I wonder, am I acting as a character, like a manic pixie dream girl, or am I just operating? I am who I am, whatever. I think it's interesting to think about how that sort of self-stereotyping can become a facade. Thinking about yourself as a character in that way can act as a shorthand to feel understood by yourself and by those around you. It can feel like emotional intimacy, but it’s also hollow and makes me wonder what's beyond that.
These sorts of facades, characters, caricatures that are legible through heavy stylizing can also be a form of self-protection. I've been thinking a lot about that in relation to the physical form of armor, specifically in works like Miss Liberty, but also more literally in my work with cast dolls interacting with these umbrella-shields, like When It Rains, It Pours.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: These dolls, umbrellas, and bags you cast also exist as multiples outside of your handcrafted work, correct?
AS: Yes. I like engaging with things that I know are mass-produced and mirroring the process of mass production, but bringing it into a fine arts realm. Casting feels like both a way to assert sentimentality but also exercise detachment. A mold captures every detail, but a cast is never quite the same as an original. That’s what happens when you inherit something, like an object, a style, or a worldview. By the time it passes through your life, it’s shifted. Warped a little. Still recognizable, but touched by a new context and logic. The result is a new object that holds the ghost of its former self, but also becomes something else entirely. Maybe it exists on its own terms as something that sits between preservation and transformation.
So much of my work revolves around ideas that were handed down to me through people in my life and American culture at large. Casting becomes a process, like a physical metaphor for understanding how an object, style, or memory becomes a part of your identity. Replicating these forms feels like a way for me to work through and understand the layers of meaning attached to my memory of these things. It’s not just about copying something familiar; it’s a process that lets me step back and reassess objects laden with personal or cultural significance. Remaking these forms helps me process these memories. It’s both a way of holding on to what has shaped me and a method of transforming it into something that feels new and more aligned with who I am now.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
ACK: I’m curious about your interest in seriality and why you keep using the same forms again and again. Is it a way of perfecting or a process of understanding? And what are these objects giving you when you repeat their forms?
AS: I think it's a way of understanding, or maybe it's about not wanting to let go of something. Like a habit, I don't think I'm that concerned with perfecting. When I repeat a form, it starts to lose its original weight and take on something new because I’m changing how it’s made, how it functions, and how it’s seen. It becomes more about labor, memory, and time. A doll or a woven wicker handbag are both things that can be perceived as soft, sentimental, feminine, or decorative, but by casting them, I take away their original function, strip them of softness, and present them as fixed, sculptural forms. That shift makes room for new associations. They stop being accessories or props and start becoming stand-ins for one’s identity or unresolved feelings. They’re not trying to be useful or cute anymore; they’re trying to be understood. The more I spend time with a form, the more it becomes a reflection of the process, not just the object. It becomes a record of how it changed, what I’ve needed from it, and what I’ve let go of.
I’m not trying to erase their origins, but I am trying to make them mine in a different way. The work says: I see where this came from, I understand how it shaped me, and now I’m holding it in a new light.
Amy Stober
Hand in My Pocket
PAGE (NYC)
Los Angeles
November 23, 2024 — January 11, 2025
Amy Stober is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Stober’s recent solo exhibitions include Hand in My Pocket at PAGE (NYC) (New York, NY), Self Storage at A.D. Gallery (New York, NY), and Holding Patterns at Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore, MD). Recent group and two-person exhibitions include Fad Infinitum at Iowa Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Three Sides Enclosed, The Fourth Open to a Wash of the Weather at Ensemble (New York, NY), Ditto with Emma Schwartz at Hesse Flatow (New York, NY), The Artificial Silk Girl at Brunette Coleman (London, UK), Elective Affinities at Chapter NY (New York, NY), May My Fiction Rule at Chris Andrews (Montreal, QC) and Electric Affinities at T293 Gallery (Rome, IT).
Almog Cohen Kashi is an art critic, historian, and theorist currently pursuing her PhD in art history at Stony Brook University, with a focus on modern and contemporary sculpture. She spends a lot of time looking at art and even more time thinking about it.