How has visual culture influenced our evolving relationship to food?
Food is one of the only things absolutely necessary, with water, for humans’ life.
Food is the source from which we have physical energy but also a fully active brain.
This being said, we know that food has always been in the center of our lives. The bookFood and visual culture at the museum of modern art says: Food is essential to human’s life and is thus one of the most compelling subject for art from the ancient world to our own times”
I decided to create works of art using three colors in order to create colors code that would link all of the pieces together. The object I used as a basis as all of my works of art are candies : life savers, peanuts butter cups that I spray painted in black , M&Ms spay painted in red and also receipts from food purchases.
Until the the final project I explored the intimate relationship between food and visual culture by realizing several works of art all explaining and traducing the impact of visual culture on our relation ship to food.
The process:
Spray painting the candies in order to maintain the color scheme.
This process led to the creation of several small pieces of art:
This is a work of art entirely made out of food purchase receipts. This shows the consumer spirit we have towards food, instead of buying basics like vegetable food and meath we are more appealed by the idea of thing new restaurants, new flavors.
This work of art is many lives savers spray painted in red white and black? I put them I a plexiglas ball and closed it. This was based on the idea of the behavior we should have towards food: find a balance. we should eat but not too much, healthy but know how to appreciate food. The idea of putting it in a ball is to convey the idea of finding a balance, as a matter a fact if you don’t place the candies a certain way in the ball, the ball doesn’t stay straight, it is only when you find the perfect balance that it does.
This a picture of the plastic tube filled up with spray painted life savers’ covers. This tube represents an oesophagus. i wanted to represent an oesophagus because it is the organ trough which food is consumed. I also mixed candles covers and the oesophagus as a metaphor to say that we are consumed by our consumerism.
The piece , was made out of life savers and rubber, it represents a net which is, here,meant as a trap. Nowadays food is such an obsession that we are in a way trapped by it. We are at a point where, not thinking about food became nearly impossible.
This necklace made out of life savers means that food became a trend ad fashion is a trend. This piece has the same meaning as the purse I created out of life savers:
Food a matter all over the world.
This art piece made out of life savers stuck all a round a ball means that food became a very important subject all over the world.
This piece is a gelatin brain made out of gelatin and caramel, to show that that food apart from being a fuel is something that is controlled by our brain which makes us crave so many things that we don’t really need. Because our brain see food so much, it creates automatically this obsession with food. Also brain needs sugar to function so I thought the brain was an interesting idea to incorporate to this question of the impact of Visual Culture on our relationship to food.
This pack of cigarettes with life savers stuck on it was also part of the exploration process which led to an bigger idea for my final project.
What better way of traducing this growing addiction for food than combining packs of cigarettes ( addiction) and food ( life savers)
Final project:
This was during the building of the final piece. I has to staple more than a thousand life savers. I stuck them on Malboro pack to keep the color scheme: black red and white ( A color scheme to make the piece attractive and connected the visual culture). The packs are red, the life savers are white and the staples were black and red.
The idea was to accumulate as many life savers as I could to really show this idea of a growing consumerism.
The fact that I stuck this accumulation of life savers on cigarettes’ packs immediately showed this idea of food becoming an addiction.
I also made a connection with the essay I wrote for Seminar because in it I explain that food is not for its real nature anymore which is: a fuel, a life saver, something than only exists to maintain us alive.
I decided to call the piece: Visual Addiction because I truly think that the growth and the expansion of visual culture with Instagram, Facebook, advertisement completely made our vision of food shift. Now we want to try so many restaurants, we would choose a beautiful plate over food of good quality, people start to have for habit to photograph their food in order to publish them on social networks. Lets not forget that a thousand years ago we were a society of hunter and gather and that we would just collect food to provide our needs.
