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Written by Jessica Hopkins

The concentrated trance of the shopper/ consumer can be viewed as a meditation focused on the perfect expression of the dreams of middle class women. In this world, where appearances reign, Maggie Miller performs a hilarious and dark dissection, directing us to look at monstrosity while dazzling us with a finely wrought instinct for the persistence of surface beauty.

That alone would be alluring enough, but A Wife offers much more.  Channeling Lacan via David Lynch, Miller holds a mirror up to herself as well as the viewer, weighing the vacancy and the validity of our desires, while exploring the room where nightmares spill into reality.  Miller, whose work often deals with the horrors lurking beneath the pristine surface of middle class life, here takes on marriage, motherhood, food, cooking, and homemaking.

As with Martha Stewart, the mundane is fetishized in a pathology of perfection.  We laugh, but little needles of identification catch in our throat. A Wife is a triumph of beauty and discomfort, written in blood.