Zoë Schneider: Otherworldly Abundance
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Estevan Art Gallery & Museum 118 4 Street, Estevan, Saskatchewan S4A 0T4
Zoë Schneider, "Otherworldly Abundance," 2020
misxed media installation detail
Zoë Schneider: Otherworldly Abundance
Otherworldly Abundance is an immersive exhibition that reorients concepts of fatness, the grotesque, and extraterrestrial worlds. Imagery of carbohydrates, like bread and potato chips, complicate ideas of fatness, food, and the modern-day understanding of the word grotesque by situating the viewer inside an abundance of nourishment. Micro and macro worlds echo each other, inviting the viewer into a pastel hued world of Candyland meets gingerbread house.
On the micro scale, a fat alien goddess named Numina and her zaftig friends lounge in their extraterrestrial world; an alien utopia that functions as a flourishment of fatness. Numina is an alien goddess character that was created by three-dimensionally scanning and then rendering the costumed artist into a six-inch-tall plastic action figure. Pastel islands shaped like organic doorways or mounds are bordered in mortar that resembles the frosted border on a cake. Dwellings and structures made of salt dough, plaster, mortar, drywall compound, wax, and found plastic and foam toys emerge from the islands. Salt dough shaped by drying on bunt pans and mixing bowls folds like skin and is dotted with salt crystal pores. The structures and dwellings are non-traditional with open doorways and windows; resembling forms like Epcot, Auroville, and Salvation Mountain, these buildings feel more like structures made for ritual and contemplation.
The theme of constructed worlds continues on the macro level with the grotto. In the fifteenth century Nero’s Domus Aurea, a forgotten underworld palace, was rediscovered beneath the streets of Rome. The rooms were ornately decorated with frescos, mosaics, and abundant gold leaf. In awe, artists would visit the site, becoming heavily influenced by the spectacle. Deeming the ruin “grottesca” or “of the cave,” the imagery and word would eventually morph into the contemporary grotesque.[i] The Domus Aurea is not, however, how one would describe popular understandings of the grotesque. When one thinks of the word grotesque, we imagine abjection, horror, even gore. Grotesque applied to fatness is pejorative; it exposes the biases of the contemporary social imagination. The grotto’s façade is decorated not with shells (like the rococo grotto) but with breads- a demonized food that is blamed for fatness (characterized by low carbohydrate diets like Wheat Belly, Atkins, etc.), but is also a source of comfort (as we’ve seen during the initial stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting surge of home baking that took place). There is a massive wealth of breads, a number that has the potential to feel overwhelming, chaotic, or comical; words that are interchangeable with derisive concepts of fatness. But the breads, buns, and chips are used in a way that is decorative. This grotto is aesthetically pleasing, as if from a fairytale, it is playful and inviting. It engages the abundance of material without manifesting the feelings of disgust or abjection that accompany modern understandings of grotesque. This is partially due to the decorative application of material but is also reinforced by sounds emanating from a mini-waterfall fountain and the use of human scale architecture to create the grotto. The viewer wanders through the grotto as if wandering through a garden or park; it is a tranquil meander, an opportunity to undo the associations that the grotto-esque/grotesque normally provokes.
In Otherworldly Abundance we enter a world that embodies magnitude and miniature in one, making uneasy the question of scale and size. Not interested in fetishizing or making spectacle, the artist represents fatness as epistemology. Without our preconceived notions about fatness at the forefront of our minds, could experience fatness in an entirely different, more kind, and soft way?
-Taken from the statement of the artist.
[i] 1Michael Squire, “Fantasies so varied and bizarre: The Domus Aurea, the Renaissance, and the ‘grotesque’,” in M. Dinter and E. Buckley (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Age of Nero (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 449.