Galveston Artist Residency is pleased to announce, NAUSEA, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist, Arden Surdam.
For her first show in Texas, Surdam presents six photographs alongside a freshwater aquatic installation and a custom donut-shaped algae tank, which will cultivate the growth of Nannochlropsis (green algae) during the exhibition period.
Through ongoing research on the coded relationship between art and food, Surdam’s work probes the convergence of class, art history, and culinary traditions. Directing viewers to tune into the historical use of food and its visual representation, the artist transgresses established conventions of cultural patterning and class-determined consumption.
The photographs presented in NAUSEA feature food matter like liver, rayfish, and oysters, a reference to the canonical paintings of Soutine, Bacon, and Chardin. These elegantly grotesque substances, conflate delectability, opulence, and repulsion within the still life. In addition to food materials, Surdam interjects images torn from the pages of American 1970s international cuisine cookbooks, which present visual directions on how to cook sophisticated, intercontinental meals. By re-photographing these images, the artist disrupts the intentionalityof food worldliness, questioning prescribed notions of value with portrayals of food loathing and food worshipping.
The term nausea suggests disgust, revulsion, but also to revolt, as demonstrated in nausea’s final result -physical expulsion. This reaction, both experiential and psychological, is heightened by scent, motion, or ingestion. The somatic nature of nausea is thus established in Surdam’s sculptural interventions of cultured algae and an aquatic tank, which are activated and destabilized by light, heat, and fluid. Mutating over the span of the exhibition, these works recall the instability of culinary likes and dislikes -a food material considered delectable in one century can be collectively repugnant in another. Accordingly, this (occasionally absurd) hierarchy of taste becomes the foreground for NAUSEA. |
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