Food Focus II: Macro Photography
Oxtail Texture Diptych (Contact), 2017. Digital Photographs.
Featuring an ingredient of food in an intimate way, these digital photographs are part of a series exploring macro images of food in their raw and cooked forms.
Food has more value than the nutrients it contains. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh and personal view to see behind the practical use of something in exchange for seeing the beauty of its forms.
Memento Mori
Making art in the likeness of produce is nothing new, it has become the cliche for still-life painting with the bowl of fruit meant to signify the temporary nature of life. Fresh food starts to decay and mold, flowers dry up and lose color, and we inevitably age and die. Art has been the main tool for preserving what would eventually decay and break down, and food was a common subject matter as much as portraits (especially after the protestant reformation in areas of northern Europe).
In the 19th century photography developed, eventually leading to captured moments frozen at a thousandths of a second, and with impeccable detail. Artists like Edward Weston used photography to find the patterns and abstract qualities of fruits and vegetables, while also referencing the everlasting painted fruits of Cezanne. Francis Bacon, horrified by the atrocities during WWII was haunted in his paintings with images of meat.
Contemporary Art had a more intense focus on meat and themes of meat representing the body. Meat has an underlying morbid feeling to it, but is also a source of energy and life, even in the death of an animal. In a Consumerist society meat has been equated to human bodies as commodity; food is a necessity but has also become an industrial system.
Victoria Reynolds creates ornate and flourishing painting composed of meat and ligaments. Her paintings billow with forms of unrecognizable parts that are both uneasy and delightful to look at. These artworks often look at the natural urge to dominate or mutilate, or to expose what is usually taboo or uncouth.
These photographs are a prequel to a more intense focus on the structures of produce and meat, how the textures of raw and cooked food seem influence how mankind thinks of its food. They aim to be inviting and succulent like Reynolds ruby-and-plaster paintings, and contemplative and suggestive like the paintings of Francis Bacon or Scott Conary.