Documenting how and why we consume goes beyond food pics on social media. Works here build a narrative around how food operates in our lives.They trace and interpret an ever-changing yet constant relationship with food. 

Vilma Leino

I feel the freest version of myself when I am alone in a room with a camera. Creating self-portraits makes me feel liberated and it helps me to understand my identity and surroundings.  It is a way to seek, play, and have fun and as well it is a way for me to hide, isolate and be alone with my thoughts and feelings. When I’m creating my artwork, the camera is an ally who doesn’t judge. It gives me space to get to know myself through art and experiment with my body, mind, and emotions. In my work, I use bright colors to visualize experiences that are difficult to communicate verbally. To clear the mixed thread between strong and mellow, to create clarity to chaos. I mix quirky details with pastel shades, to create an atmosphere where comedy and panic are welcome to meet each other and tell an untold story that gives the viewer many possible endings. My portraits are stories from inside the household, where daily life turns strange and the person we are is in the main spotlight as the one we should learn to love and take care of.

Vilma Leino (b. Finland, 1999) is a Berlin-based photographer. She uses humorous self-portraiture that balances beauty and horror, to reflect inner emotions and solitude, and to talk about difficult psychological stages.

Matthew Pagoaga

8-Course Meal is an experimentation in media consumption via rules and rhythms. A chaotic assortment of media hides a narrative structured via a heavy set of guidelines. The composition takes three separate panels: The first shows food presentation, predominantly within commercial setting. The second shows food consumption via both educational and commercial media. The third shows food preparation via predominantly educational films. Together the three frames form a narrative of food horror and guided consumption toward an end perhaps not as altruistically educational as media would present. Meant to mirror the rules and rhythms of our consumption flow throughout a coursed meal, or our day, or the course of our lifetime, 8-Course Meal is an experiment in consumption of media on consumption, structured. https://vimeo.com/666139692

Matthew Pagoaga is a Los Angeles-based artist and technologist. His work interprets datasets toward aesthetic revisualizations and embodied experiences utilizing a combination of mixed-media, technology, and public art.

Sarah Legow

The photographic series “Breakfast Mandalas” (2020) is the documentation of a performance — a daily, quarantine-era ritual, created and then consumed. 

The project was partially informed by my memories of a college semester abroad in Madurai, India, where each morning women in the neighborhood re-drew intricate, radially symmetrical rice-flour drawings (kolam) on the passageways outside their homes.

Sarah Legow (b. 1982, Youngstown, Ohio) is a sculpture, video, text & installation artist living in Porto, Portugal. She earned her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.

Geovany Uranda

“Autorretrato (eating at odyssey pizza in hopes that they don’t fall to gentrification)” is a self portrait I took while eating at Odyssey Pizza, one of my favorite spots in East Downtown Las Vegas. It’s a small business that has existed there since my childhood. My partner Sara, who helped me take this shot, introduced the hole-in-the-wall to me when we began dating 14 years ago and have not stopped going since then. We believe that eating there and supporting their business will help a bit while the gentrifying forces of downtown move east.

Geovany Uranda is a Las Vegas Chicano/e multidisciplinary artist exploring convoluted identities, the romanticization of culture, and isms of society.

Miggie Wong

14 Days Quarantine Meal Drawing Project, shares my quarantine experience in Hong Kong. This project documents 42 pre-ordered and contactless delivered meals. It also publishes a collection of mementos and forward momentum under the impact of Covid-19. During quarantine, daily meal delivery had become the only physical exchange I received from others. I observed, consumed, and reflected on each meal. The meals delivery schedule became the structure of my drawing routine and the essential activity during my quarantine.

I included the Western/American food in my meal plan because these foods are the common choices of my usual diet while living in the U.S. I was also curious of the authenticity of the presentation and taste of such choices while in Hong Kong.

Miggie Wong creates situation-based performative projects which offer whimsical experiments that explore and document ideas of social interaction, cultural mutation, senses of belonging, and acts of sincerity.