Hall of Portraits from The History of Machines constructs a disquieting satire that proposes an alternate pictorial history in which two objects of desire become one — the household convenience object and the emergent female form. In looking back at mid-20th century post-war commercial culture in America, the new modern woman begins to be idealized as sharing attributes with objects of domestic convenience, efficiency, and planned obsolescence. Mining the archive of material culture from advertising to the manufactured objects themselves, labor-saving domestic machines merge with the body, or vice-versa.