Earthly Delights - Diet Culture & The Still Life
The Earthly Delights series is an investigation is into the societal conditions which have led to an evolving fixation with images of food in my paintings, through the genre of still life painting. In the Kitchen Sink Dramas, small scale still life paintings depict a dilemma of body and mind in the context of health and diet culture.
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Photo Credits clockwise from top left, Amir Said (for the Western Wheel), Debbie.lee Miszaniec, Amir Said, Amir Said.
The Earthly Delights, Still Lives in Places project transforms a personal journey of weight loss through health and diet culture into artworks which speak to the dilemma presented to society by health motivated weight loss.
Mainstream conversations around body ideals are shifting, yet while the body positivity movement has encouraged a more inclusive perspective on body size, there are still health concerns for individuals struggling to balance the health consequences of obesity against the health consequence of long term weight loss efforts. As someone coping with that legacy I am challenging myself to talk about it through my work.
The paintings address the fascination with images of food in western society in a way which connects to those who are caught in the weight loss cycle, while expanding outward to an understanding of the complexity of the problem of weight loss and our cultural obsession with it.
This project was made possible by funding from Calgary Arts Development Association and the City of Calgary.
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Earthly Delights: Lost In The Garden
Work In Progress Gallery:
Watch this space for project updates.
The goal of Earthly Delights: Lost In The Garden is the creation of a large scale oil painting triptych exploring contemporary health and diet culture over the course of 2023. The triptych will explore the lifecycle of influences that continue to complicate our relationship with our bodies and our weight. For this project I will be expanding upon my still life food paintings, by incorporating them into an encyclopedic larger than life triptych reinterpreting The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500) by Hieronymus Bosch.
This project is being made possible by funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
