Book of Oats, 2019
Mixed media collage (tissue paper, colored paper, gouache , acrylic, magazine paper, graphite, oats, glue on repurposed book)
The memory book was a long term project representing and memorializing each student's chosen topic. I toyed with different ideas - such as creating a book of postcards depicting memories of my childhood and places I've been to or representing the idea of the home using Dwell magazine as a starting point - but in the end, I went with the idea of an "oat book" where I abstracted images of oats. The result is a humorous subversive attempt at exploring our habit of obsessing over and documenting what we eat.
We had the choice to repurpose a book or make one; I chose the former. I scoured the bookstands at Strands bookstore and discovered a simple square think book with a yellow neon cover filled with drawings of shoes and a transcript of the interview with the artist in Italian. After some research I learned that the artist Alvise Bittente is interested in representing everyday mundane objects in hyper conventional and simplistic ways, and ridding them of their intended function. By removing them from their normal contexts, these objects - generally knives, forks, aprons, plunges - become emotionless and bare. The following quotes describe his project :
"Everything can be registered and put down on paper, removed from its referential context and thus presented without spatial or semantic relationships with other things, isolated like an icon in the blank space of the paper. [...] The serial system drains the object of affectivity, and what matters are not its individual characteristics but rather the fact that it fulfills a certain kind of function. [...]
Bittente's line develops subtly, like an embroidery, and what remains of the object is the black skeleton of the ink mark, summary but precise. His approach is like that of a technical draftsman--detailed, cool, and objectified. In his drawings, the world of functions and things seems to be an end in itself, without a foothold in a subjective realm that might imbue it with meaning. The drawings have been affixed to a rigid support and laminated, making the mark seem ethereal and even further annulling any possible subjectivity."
Thus, using the book and the artist's vision as inspiration, I decided apply the same treatment Bittente did to shoes, to oats - albeit with my own twist. I chose oats because I love them as a food, and am fascinated by how beautiful they can be when paired with colorful ingredients full of textures and shapes; they become like works of art, visually intriguing canvases that make the oat unrecognizable as oats. I even held an Instagram account where I posted pictures of the foods I ate, and most of the time, it was oats. Hence, I wanted to explore this concept of "decorating" or "beautifying" foods to make them appealing to others on social media by challenging this - my - behavior. By streamlining and simplifying what can be complex dishes, I am questioning the value we place on such foods. Do we eat things simply for there looks? What happens when you strip something down to its most basic form? Conversely, what happens when you make something that is as simple as a bowl of oats into something surreal and abstract? What does that mean about our relationship to this food?
Additionally, Bittente uses quotes and word plays to question and make fun of our affection towards certain objects. In line with this, I incorporated words and phrases into some of the pages as if the shoes-turned-oats were speaking. This absurdity once again attempts to question our perceptions of certain foods, and subverts the idea whereby food is just food. What if our food spoke? What would it say of us?
In short, this project was an attempt at commenting on the trend of taking food pictures in a highly curated manner and destined for sharing on social media. Food bloggers or "influencers" typically go through a whole setup for their picture, a mise en place intended to highlight the dish or meal, but that becomes, in turn, a false reflection of reality. The mise en place becomes a mise en scene. The picture is no longer authentic, it is curated and predetermined; like theater, it becomes an illusion of reality. So what if I attempted to give an illusion of reality too?