Zoë Schneider, "Swimming in the Nostalgia of Imaginary Pies #7"
coroplast, polyurethane foam, expanding rigid foam, spackling, adhesive, acrylic, and sealant
28"x 17"x 4"
2022
Fixation on food develops when a person is in diet mode. In 1944 Ancel Keys, PhD began the Minnesota Starvation Experiment1. Thirty-six young men were put on a diet of 1570 calories per day2 (the average weight loss diet of today starts most people at 1200 calories per day). One of the many results of this diet was a preoccupation with food including “increased interest in food, talk and thoughts about food, collecting recipes, studying menus… craving food…”3.
I lived vicariously through films featuring joyful preparation and consumption of food during the height of my diet days. I pinpointed the film 'Hook' (1991) as one of the early films that I fixated on, specifically the food fight scene. The camera pans over the table filled with steaming piles of meats, breads, cheeses, and featured brightly coloured “icing pies”. Pies filled with icing. I remember marveling over the concept. That point in the film features unbounded enjoyment of food, followed by the food fight, symbolizing the excess of food and the comfort to play with it. Swimming in the Nostalgia of Imaginary Pies speaks to the warm nostalgia I have for the period that Hook came from, coupled with the bitersweet knowing of the culture I was swimming in.
1 Baker, Dr. David and Keramidas, Natacha, The Psychology of Hunger, American Psychological Association, htps://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger
2,3 Starvation Syndrome, The Biology of Starvation: Ancel Keys’ Minnesota study, CEED Clinical Resources, htps://ceed.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CEED_Handout_Starvation-Syndrome.pdf
STATEMENT
Inhabiting a fat body poses a series of complexities. A fat body is a physical marker of difference that is immediately visible; it is different from what the dominant culture prescribes as ideal and sometimes judged as a condition by choice. Fat people are assumed to be lazy and stupid, lacking in willpower, failures in the quest for normative thinness; fat theorists Braziel and LeBesco elaborate on the ways fat is equated with otherness: “frequently the fat body is read as corporeal presencing of other, presumably more intrinsic, incorporeal qualities or characteristics – the signifying of latency and lack. Fat equals reckless excess, prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space, transgression of boundary”1. Subsequently, for the fat person a tumultuous relationship with ones’ body is common. In my work, I want the viewer to encounter the intricacy of inhabiting a fat feminine body; what author Samantha Murray outlines as the possibility “to reconceive the ‘fat’ body as a site of numerous discursive intersections, the effect of normative feminine beauty, health, gendered (hetero)sexual appeal, self-authorship, moral fortitude, fears of excess and addiction”2. My work explores a variety of emotions and concepts through the lens of fatness, giving voice to the complexity of fat identity.
Working in sculpture and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, I consider topics including the expanding body, the body under restriction and surveillance, obsession in diet culture, the medical industry and the fat body, inherited food values, and societal confusion around food. Expansion, accumulation, restriction, and shrinkage are referenced through material explorations with bread dough,
mortar, and silicone. Otien the works show manipulation by the hands, implicating materiality with fat embodiment; concrete is dug with fingers, dough is kneaded and formed, mortar is manipulated like sausages.
1 Braziel, Jana and LeBesco, Kathleen. Bodies out of bounds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print. Pg. 3.
2 Murray, Samantha. The ‘Fat’ Female Body. Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Pg. 14.
BIO
Zoë Schneider (she/her) is based in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, Canada. Working in sculpture, video, and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, Schneider considers topics including inherited food values, societal confusion and moralization of food, food nostalgia, the body under restriction and surveillance, and obsession in diet culture.
Schneider holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan (2018), and a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts (2009). In Canada Schneider has exhibited in Regina, Saskatoon, Estevan, Guelph, Mississauga, Lethbridge, and internationally in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Schneider is a contributing author in the text ‘Casual Encounters’—Catalyst: Cindy Baker for Noxious Sector Press, 2021. Schneider is the 2021 recipient of the Visual Award for Female Artist, Jane Turnbull Evans Fund from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts.
coroplast, polyurethane foam, expanding rigid foam, spackling, adhesive, acrylic, and sealant
28"x 17"x 4"
2022
Fixation on food develops when a person is in diet mode. In 1944 Ancel Keys, PhD began the Minnesota Starvation Experiment1. Thirty-six young men were put on a diet of 1570 calories per day2 (the average weight loss diet of today starts most people at 1200 calories per day). One of the many results of this diet was a preoccupation with food including “increased interest in food, talk and thoughts about food, collecting recipes, studying menus… craving food…”3.
I lived vicariously through films featuring joyful preparation and consumption of food during the height of my diet days. I pinpointed the film 'Hook' (1991) as one of the early films that I fixated on, specifically the food fight scene. The camera pans over the table filled with steaming piles of meats, breads, cheeses, and featured brightly coloured “icing pies”. Pies filled with icing. I remember marveling over the concept. That point in the film features unbounded enjoyment of food, followed by the food fight, symbolizing the excess of food and the comfort to play with it. Swimming in the Nostalgia of Imaginary Pies speaks to the warm nostalgia I have for the period that Hook came from, coupled with the bitersweet knowing of the culture I was swimming in.
1 Baker, Dr. David and Keramidas, Natacha, The Psychology of Hunger, American Psychological Association, htps://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger
2,3 Starvation Syndrome, The Biology of Starvation: Ancel Keys’ Minnesota study, CEED Clinical Resources, htps://ceed.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CEED_Handout_Starvation-Syndrome.pdf
STATEMENT
Inhabiting a fat body poses a series of complexities. A fat body is a physical marker of difference that is immediately visible; it is different from what the dominant culture prescribes as ideal and sometimes judged as a condition by choice. Fat people are assumed to be lazy and stupid, lacking in willpower, failures in the quest for normative thinness; fat theorists Braziel and LeBesco elaborate on the ways fat is equated with otherness: “frequently the fat body is read as corporeal presencing of other, presumably more intrinsic, incorporeal qualities or characteristics – the signifying of latency and lack. Fat equals reckless excess, prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space, transgression of boundary”1. Subsequently, for the fat person a tumultuous relationship with ones’ body is common. In my work, I want the viewer to encounter the intricacy of inhabiting a fat feminine body; what author Samantha Murray outlines as the possibility “to reconceive the ‘fat’ body as a site of numerous discursive intersections, the effect of normative feminine beauty, health, gendered (hetero)sexual appeal, self-authorship, moral fortitude, fears of excess and addiction”2. My work explores a variety of emotions and concepts through the lens of fatness, giving voice to the complexity of fat identity.
Working in sculpture and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, I consider topics including the expanding body, the body under restriction and surveillance, obsession in diet culture, the medical industry and the fat body, inherited food values, and societal confusion around food. Expansion, accumulation, restriction, and shrinkage are referenced through material explorations with bread dough,
mortar, and silicone. Otien the works show manipulation by the hands, implicating materiality with fat embodiment; concrete is dug with fingers, dough is kneaded and formed, mortar is manipulated like sausages.
1 Braziel, Jana and LeBesco, Kathleen. Bodies out of bounds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print. Pg. 3.
2 Murray, Samantha. The ‘Fat’ Female Body. Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Pg. 14.
BIO
Zoë Schneider (she/her) is based in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, Canada. Working in sculpture, video, and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, Schneider considers topics including inherited food values, societal confusion and moralization of food, food nostalgia, the body under restriction and surveillance, and obsession in diet culture.
Schneider holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan (2018), and a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts (2009). In Canada Schneider has exhibited in Regina, Saskatoon, Estevan, Guelph, Mississauga, Lethbridge, and internationally in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Schneider is a contributing author in the text ‘Casual Encounters’—Catalyst: Cindy Baker for Noxious Sector Press, 2021. Schneider is the 2021 recipient of the Visual Award for Female Artist, Jane Turnbull Evans Fund from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts.
coroplast, polyurethane foam, expanding rigid foam, spackling, adhesive, acrylic, and sealant
28"x 17"x 4"
2022
Fixation on food develops when a person is in diet mode. In 1944 Ancel Keys, PhD began the Minnesota Starvation Experiment1. Thirty-six young men were put on a diet of 1570 calories per day2 (the average weight loss diet of today starts most people at 1200 calories per day). One of the many results of this diet was a preoccupation with food including “increased interest in food, talk and thoughts about food, collecting recipes, studying menus… craving food…”3.
I lived vicariously through films featuring joyful preparation and consumption of food during the height of my diet days. I pinpointed the film 'Hook' (1991) as one of the early films that I fixated on, specifically the food fight scene. The camera pans over the table filled with steaming piles of meats, breads, cheeses, and featured brightly coloured “icing pies”. Pies filled with icing. I remember marveling over the concept. That point in the film features unbounded enjoyment of food, followed by the food fight, symbolizing the excess of food and the comfort to play with it. Swimming in the Nostalgia of Imaginary Pies speaks to the warm nostalgia I have for the period that Hook came from, coupled with the bitersweet knowing of the culture I was swimming in.
1 Baker, Dr. David and Keramidas, Natacha, The Psychology of Hunger, American Psychological Association, htps://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger
2,3 Starvation Syndrome, The Biology of Starvation: Ancel Keys’ Minnesota study, CEED Clinical Resources, htps://ceed.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CEED_Handout_Starvation-Syndrome.pdf
STATEMENT
Inhabiting a fat body poses a series of complexities. A fat body is a physical marker of difference that is immediately visible; it is different from what the dominant culture prescribes as ideal and sometimes judged as a condition by choice. Fat people are assumed to be lazy and stupid, lacking in willpower, failures in the quest for normative thinness; fat theorists Braziel and LeBesco elaborate on the ways fat is equated with otherness: “frequently the fat body is read as corporeal presencing of other, presumably more intrinsic, incorporeal qualities or characteristics – the signifying of latency and lack. Fat equals reckless excess, prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space, transgression of boundary”1. Subsequently, for the fat person a tumultuous relationship with ones’ body is common. In my work, I want the viewer to encounter the intricacy of inhabiting a fat feminine body; what author Samantha Murray outlines as the possibility “to reconceive the ‘fat’ body as a site of numerous discursive intersections, the effect of normative feminine beauty, health, gendered (hetero)sexual appeal, self-authorship, moral fortitude, fears of excess and addiction”2. My work explores a variety of emotions and concepts through the lens of fatness, giving voice to the complexity of fat identity.
Working in sculpture and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, I consider topics including the expanding body, the body under restriction and surveillance, obsession in diet culture, the medical industry and the fat body, inherited food values, and societal confusion around food. Expansion, accumulation, restriction, and shrinkage are referenced through material explorations with bread dough,
mortar, and silicone. Otien the works show manipulation by the hands, implicating materiality with fat embodiment; concrete is dug with fingers, dough is kneaded and formed, mortar is manipulated like sausages.
1 Braziel, Jana and LeBesco, Kathleen. Bodies out of bounds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print. Pg. 3.
2 Murray, Samantha. The ‘Fat’ Female Body. Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Pg. 14.
BIO
Zoë Schneider (she/her) is based in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, Canada. Working in sculpture, video, and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity, Schneider considers topics including inherited food values, societal confusion and moralization of food, food nostalgia, the body under restriction and surveillance, and obsession in diet culture.
Schneider holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan (2018), and a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts (2009). In Canada Schneider has exhibited in Regina, Saskatoon, Estevan, Guelph, Mississauga, Lethbridge, and internationally in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Schneider is a contributing author in the text ‘Casual Encounters’—Catalyst: Cindy Baker for Noxious Sector Press, 2021. Schneider is the 2021 recipient of the Visual Award for Female Artist, Jane Turnbull Evans Fund from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts.