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.
Earthly Delights - Running On Empty
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.
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Power or Glory
September 17 – October 19
Exhibited in partnership with Alcove Centre for the Arts
On view at Alcove Centre for the Arts, 244 7 Ave SW, Calgary, AB T2P 0W6
Future historians may view health motivated weight-loss as on par with balancing humours. However in the past the reward was often social currency, by demonstrating virtue as the ability to master the body.
Power or Glory uses playground physics to think about weight modification in relation to power dynamics: pairing different masses on a teeter totter results in a power imbalance where the smaller mass, while elevated, is hostage to the larger mass. Agency is inherent in the position of having the greater mass, while the smaller relies on the larger for position. I am curious about who would encourage a condition of dependency as a demonstration of virtue, and why?A wander through art/history brings me to the court of Louis XIV and the demonstration of power known as the grand couvert: courtiers crowd the room to watch as the Sun King dines nightly on a feast of over one-hundred dishes. You stand uncomfortably in formal attire, tired and hungry, as courses of aromatic dishes are paraded past you to the king’s table. Fourteen of his chosen gentleman servants will enjoy the privilege of dining on his leftovers afterward. Later that night you can compete with the public to purchase the king’s leftover leftovers.
On the other side of the plank, I think about his descendant’s queen, Marie Antoinette. Despite being guaranteed a place at the king’s table, she dined sparingly enough to have maintained a 23” waist, and to have inspired a diet book (Wheeler, 2014). Frequently she would neither remove her glove nor unfold her napkin while seated at the Louis XVI side during the grand couvert. While the French common people could not afford to eat she was publicly refusing to eat. Why would she do this?
Ultimately though, hunger is a sharp tool.
Debbie.lee Miszaniec is an Alberta artist working in Calgary. She holds a BFA (2008) from the Alberta University of the Arts. Her paintings draw from her observations of the human experience, history and society as well as her own experience as a working class western female artist. In 2020 her series documenting the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic generated international attention. She received a Calgary Arts Development Project Grant (2022) and a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant (2023) in support of her current work exploring health and diet culture.
Presenting this exhibition was made possible with the generosity of Alcove Centre for the Arts. For more information about Alcove, please click here.