Feast and Famine Gallery

Besem Etta-Ashu

Feast and Famine Gallery

November 13, 2019

BODY BEAUTY

The Feast and Famine exhibition in Newark explores food as a social, political, and bodily phenomenon. Artists whose works are displayed in the gallery took the idea of food and developed a deeper as well as activist meaning for food. These artists considered food as having a relationship/connection to death, sex, food production, food justice, global economics, geopolitics and most importantly social media standards. All the art pieces at the gallery were highly incredibly made but the four art pieces I choose to write about caught my attention immediately because of the message in which the artwork portrays and also because those artwork related to my final project.

The first artwork that I will be addressing is called Rap On Race With Rice made by Ms. Dominique Duroseau in 2017. The way in which this art was represented in the gallery was there was a mixture of black and white rice on a table. There was one chair at each end of the table. People can sit around the table having a discussion while separating the rice by colors. The main idea of this piece was that the economy can sit and talk about race, it's not something to be hidden or afraid to be brought to an open discussion. But I took another perception of the artwork. I saw this piece as the amount of time and patience that the society/government puts into separating our races who are honestly better off working together/ mixed together. Our economy is constantly creating systems in which one race is benefits and superior to the other, which is usually whites superior over the other races. This piece is an activist piece because it addresses racism and segregation. For several generations, races have been separated from each other because we just can not be seen as EQUALS in this economy, although our society claims to treat everyone equally. 

My second artwork was made by Lauren Greenfield in 2016. This art piece is unlike any other artwork in the gallery because the artist took pictures of real-life people's journeys with food problems to showcase as her piece. Food plays a major part in the development and growth of our bodies. But some people are being abused or abuse by preventing themselves from the intake of certain amounts of food. In today's economy, social media plays a major role in the perception of beauty. People are starving themselves or in other cases consuming large amounts of food just to have the perfect body. Some people are looking at celebrities as the ideal perfection of everything, so in order for them to be considered beautiful, they have to have the same body image, weight, hair, food consumption as celebrities. This artwork is an activism piece because it represents problems in which females have to go through in order to be considered beautiful.  

My final project is based on women empowerment. I want to inspire women to begin to see themselves as the ideal perfect woman rather than trying to chase unrealistic accomplishments. Those two artwork pieces relate to my final project because they are encouraging our society to accept those things in which our economy has made almost impossible to accept. Not everything has to be separated and categorized, sometimes they are perfect just the way they are. Our economy is better when our races work together bringing our different cultures, values, beliefs, tradition to the table rather than work separately. when it comes to standards of beauty, women of color are the ones who try their very hardest to fit social media ideal sense of beauty. They find it so hard, almost impossible to love their true selves because the media portrays their true version as the version that needs to be changed. The two artworks and my project main goal are to make society find beauty where they chose to hate and disperse, themselves.

The challenge/critique of these issues is important because "many are so blind to their own adoration for power and importance that they simply trust social capital blindly" (Interventionist). Many people tend to desire to have what these celebrities have and be exactly like them without noticing or taking into consideration that no one is perfect. Celebrities have physical problems of their own and are also looking up to other people as their motivation and ideal perfection of beauty. A very interesting quote that I found in the Interventionist which relates perfectly with my project and the art pieces is "Illusion surrounds us, working their wonders so well, because we are so willing not to see them". This quote relates to the discussion we had in class. People on social media want to be noticed for the good and not the bad. they want to make their lives seem picture-perfect. Every day they live is a great day, but we all know not every single day is going to be in our favor. Social media makes us see what they want us to see, which is all fakeness and unrealistic content. The sad part is, although women know the content being provided and featured on social media is not real, some still make it their life mission to accomplish such standards.

"Humans are creatures of habits, fit in with their habits or fit outside of the habits and you will disappear from their view" (Interventionist). As humans, we tend to follow the trend or in other words, the things that are popular so we can be noticed. Society should not have that power/control over what women are supposed to do or act in order to be considered beautiful or noticed. Women should never feel the need to change themselves or stop being who they are just to be noticed or loved. Beauty is not a thing that can be constantly changed or slowly formed into perfection, BEAUTY is a way in which a person feels about themselves regardless of the critics they might get.