With Stefania, Hilliary Gabryel transforms a found headboard into a tactile monument to feminine ornamentation, desire, and resistance. Cast from a vintage bedroom set and meticulously hand-altered, the piece blends hard and soft materials—custom-colored silicone sheeting, etched mirrors, neoprene, and steel tacks—to create a hybrid form that feels both decadent and uncanny.
Gabryel often sources mass-produced bedroom furniture from online marketplaces, focusing on pieces influenced by the ornate designs of Italian-Australian furniture magnate Franco Cozzo. These swooping, plastic-laden forms were once marketed as affordable luxury—objects that promised domestic beauty and class mobility. In Gabryel’s hands, they become charged symbols: part fantasy, part critique.
Stefania invites us to consider the ways femininity is constructed through mass culture, interior spaces, and material consumption. By upholstering the sculptural surface in slick, skin-like materials and piercing it with steel hardware, Gabryel interrupts the implied passivity of the domestic object. She reclaims its sensuality on her own terms—one that is both defiant and seductive.