What's in your refrigerator?
Senior BFA Thesis Project
This installation explores
refrigerators as unconventional
private spaces that house the curated
choices of an individual’s food
consumption. I focus on refrigerators
that belong to some of my closest
friends through a series of painted
explorations and an interactive artist
book.
I have been thinking deeply about
the dynamic nature of refrigerators,
how we use them, and what they
represent. Refrigerators are a place
for constant interaction; their
contents are constantly changing.
We purchase food, arrange it, and
then rearrange it daily while
consuming and adding to it over
time. These processes are intimate
and unique and are indicative of an
individual’s personality and lifestyle
– just as the food one consumes is.
Through this project, I have
discovered a complexity in the
relationships people have with food.
But I have also discovered a sense
of whimsy when trying to figure out
those relationships by looking at
other people’s refrigerators. My hope
is that one leaves this installation
feeling curious about the way they
look at their own refrigerator and the
ones of the people close to them.
The Paintings
Series 1: Leftovers, Dairy, Misc.
I started out this exploration by looking closely at the photographs of refrigerators and starting out with some digital sketches. The process of sketching allowed me to distinguish categories of food I was observing within this refrigerator.Through this series my goal was to get the audience to look closely at these paintings that look the same, but aren’t quite the same and to perhaps identify the categories that I had identified prior to making these paintings.
Series 2: The Beverage Whimsy
I followed the same methodology as the first series for this series which was a set of 2 paintings. I found that a sense of whimsy took over the sense of categorization I was looking for when I found a majority of beverages in a close friend’s refrigerator. Which by no means was definitive of the fact that the owner has a majority preference for beverages in her food consumption, but was just a product of circumstance and a recent water bottle case purchase. This made me think deeply about how dynamic refrigerators are, and no one glimpse in time can give us the whole picture of a person and their food consumption.
Series 3: The Miscellaneous Shelf
The third series followed a similar approach to the first and second. However, my focus shifted from the whole structure of the refrigerator to the miscellaneous shelf. I was intrigued by the manner in which my roommate and I divide our refrigerator, where the first shelf is theirs the second is mine, and the third shelf is where miscellaneous things trickle down.
Series 4: Color Studies on Wood Panel
From very early on in the project I was interested in the colors of food consumption. I started collecting color bands based on the photographs of refrigerators that belong to my closest friends. Initially I grouped these colors based on the individual, but started thinking about grouping by categories of common ingredients, which resulted in specific wood panel shapes in the next stage. I was interested in this series becoming a artistic interpretation of data that I collected.
