We were given a material randomly (mine is chocolate), and were instructed to depict something using an unfamiliar material, with the medium conveying a message.
Artist Statement
New: This piece, titled “Golden Girl”, shows how the junk food industry ironically and destructively advertises their products through the hyper-idealized facade of media. The images resemble a photoshoot for an advertising campaign, featuring a young woman gleefully surrounded by chocolate, even wearing chocolate on her dress. Media projects an unhealthy body image by its emphasis on skin-deep beauty, often featuring exclusively beautiful and skinny models. In these photos, the girl’s dress makes her look “like a piece of candy”, illustrating that she is not a real person but rather an objectified, idealized version. Thus, this piece presents us with a double standard, romanticizing both the unhealthy body standards achieved only by models and the excessive consumption of junk food for the sake of pleasure. Ultimately, this is a dangerous portrayal of women and their relationship with food because this only serves to encourage women to be destructively critical of their body image for all the wrong reasons.
Original: This piece, titled “Golden Girl”, is about showing obesity visually instead of by facts or numbers. The project is a photoshoot of a model wearing a chocolate dress in a candy store. The form of this project serves to bring the junk food that people consume to the forefront, because the model in the photo is wearing chocolate details, chocolate wrappers, and chocolate jewelry. This makes the audience aware of the sheer amount of chocolate that was used on the dress, because typically people disregard what they put inside their bodies. Instead, we realize that we cannot hide from our bad habits, and ultimately the food we eat becomes a part of us. However, the model is not embarrassed at all — instead, she is essentially advertising the sheer amount of chocolate she eats and reaching for more. She is blissfully unaware of the dangerous side effects of eating too much junk food, which is how many people act towards this subject. People keep doing it, even as it starts to manifest itself in adverse ways. Ultimately, obesity is an ever growing issue that we need to address instead of being blissfully unaware like the model.
Process
