"Safe as milk"

2021

Arusha gallery (London)

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"Talking to fruits and vegetables"

acrylic on plywood

video

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In an extension of the orginal exhibition of the same name,  Safe As Milk London welcomes the work of twenty one contemporary artists, whose work each comments on our habitual relationship with hyper capitalism and food culture, this exhibition hopes to open a conversation about and highlight the carnivalesque, challenging and momentous nature of food today. 

 

Food consumption, already conditioned in us by upbringing, schooling, inherited and experienced traumas, religious rites and moral inclinations, is increasingly present in the visual realm via Instagram and other social media platforms. Visual recipes and photographs of food from film, literature, advertising, gourmet magazines, news reports and public health literature seen often through the glossy lights of our screens become pseudo-pornographic thirst traps for our senses which we further intellectualise to set rules of conduct for our psyche and body. However, rather than eating the food, we consume it with our gaze leaving us with a fleetingly quick but empty dopamine hit that fails to nourish us. An addiction to eating only with our eyes becomes perpetuated through this endless loop of online food pornography. Food becomes unattainable – an object of virtue to be desired from afar, drifting further away from embodying sustenance and nutrition.

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