Sarah Slappey describes Shelf Squeeze as the first work in a new series about “the woman in the home,” an investigation of the domestic body that continues the imagery of Louise Bourgeois, who used domestic forms to probe the inner life of femininity. This painting also marks a technical shift: thinner, stained layers make the figure feel absorbed into the room rather than standing apart from it. Behind her, Slappey inserts a section of Balthus’s The Mountain—Balthus is known for idealized images of adolescent girls often discussed through the male gaze—and she highlights the girls’ faces to grant them quiet agency. A coiled phone cord drapes across shelf and body, a relic of girlhood communication and secrecy, part lifeline, part snare. Like Dalí’s The God of the Bay of Roses, the scene holds desire, vulnerability, and power in the same frame, but Slappey relocates that psychic charge to the domestic interior, where intimacy and control play out in everyday space.