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Nettle Grellier | Oriele Steiner | Grace Mattingly | Anna Choutova | James Owens
Sophie Vallance Cantor | Anna Rocke | Amélie Peace | Megan Menzies | Georg Wilson
Olivia Sterling | Lindsey Jean McLean
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By taking food into the body, we take in the world
Powers of Horror: The Essay on Abjection, Kristeva, 1980
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Food consumption, already conditioned in us by upbringing, schooling, inherited and experienced traumas, religious rites and moral inclinations, is increasingly present in the visual realm via Instagram and other social media platforms. Visual recipes and photographs of food from film, literature, advertising, gourmet magazines, news reports and public health literature seen often through the glossy lights of our screens become pseudo-pornographic thirst traps for our senses which we further intellectualise to set rules of conduct for our psyche and body.
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The fact remains that all food is liable to defile.
Powers of Horror: The Essay on Abjection, Kristeva, 1980
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However, rather than eating the food, we consume it with our gaze leaving us with a fleetingly quick but empty dopamine hit that fails to nourish us. An addiction to eating only with our eyes becomes perpetuated through this endless loop of online food pornography. Food becomes unattainable – an object of virtue to be desired from afar, drifting further away from embodying sustenance and nutrition.
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Tensions occur within our relationship with food, as we negotiate the messages around food perpetuated in our current age. The compulsion towards wellness and health has introduced a new realm of problematic eating. A restrictive and obsessive relationship with food cleverly masquerades itself as being an environmentally and ethically conscious way of eating.
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Organic, vegan, and other oftentimes inaccessible forms of eating become thinly veiled indicators of class, moral superiority, and self-control. Food becomes an ego building, identity forming platform, wherein moral judgement is passed onto those who do not, or cannot subscribe to a similar lifestyle of the ‘civilised body’. The exhibition will offer a look into the things we over and under consume in an effort to alter and establish our identity.
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AMÉLIE PEACEI DON'T WANT THIS FACE ANYMORE, 2021 / HEELS AND A HEART, 2021Acrylic on Fabriano paper35 x 25 cm
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Restrictive eating exists in a direct clash with living in a late capitalistic, hyper-consumerist society, constantly being encouraged to over-indulge, over-buy and gorge. A duality is born, creating unparalleled difficulties surrounding food and health.
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This dichotomy is creating a completely unmanageable attitude towards food and mindful consumption, which is infinitely interesting to dissect within art as Food reveals itself as a taboo, being both pleasurable and
shameful at once. -
ANNA ROCKE, UNTITLED, 2021, Oil, acrylic and varnish on wood, 20 x 20 cm
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