-based artist places her paintings of iconic “junk foods” from the ‘90s and early 2000s, from Cosmic Brownies to Cheetos to Mountain Dew, against colorful patterned backdrops set in sparkling gold frames. The pieces draw on her and her loved ones’ experiences with food as they grew up below the poverty line and ask us to view foods commonly associated with poverty in a new light.
I started thinking about what happens if you really put the gas pedal on the aesthetics side of food. Food can really tap into class issues. There’s this idea around restraint as sort of the opposite, or the counterpart, to low class. In a world of excess and post-industrialization, having access to bright colors and rich fabrics and food and spices is kind of novel in the sense that it used to be, prior to industrialization, really just left to the wealthiest people.
Of course, we probably weren’t fooling anyone in hindsight, but it got me thinking that like, again, there’s another layer of lack of restraint or lack of taste or “too much” and how that’s often connected to lower classes. So, whenever I wanted to paint the junk food, the packaging is really bright and the food itself is often colored with bright dyes, so I wanted to hone in on this other layer of it’s flashy, it’s too much, it’s over the top. There’s no restraint.
Samantha: How did you choose the specific “junk food” products you wanted to highlight? Why did you focus on packaged junk foods over, say, fast food?I think I’m just thinking about my personal experience with it. Like, growing up, we had food stamps, so I was really lucky that, you know, within reason, I think compared to some of my peers, we had beans and rice mostly. I think I was pretty lucky.
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