Ornamental Cookery

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Svava Tergesen, “Princess Cake,” 2021

archival pigment print, 21" x 14" (private collection)

In his essay, Ornamental Cookery, French philosopher Roland Barthes was critical of the aspirational food styling found in women’s magazines of his day. He assessed this visual culture as a kind of petit-bourgeois art that made food an unattainable myth peddled to the lower classes. 

Vancouver-based artist Svava Tergesen’s show, on view until June 11 at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., as part of the Capture Photography Festival, draws its title from that 1957 essay and uses it as a structure, bending tropes of food photography to cast food beyond mere nourishment to a form of visual pleasure.  

Tergesen’s main medium is photography, but her recent works are not simply photographs. As an interdisciplinary artist, she uses Ornamental Cookery to show her skill with composition and form, sculpting and arranging foods that can quickly decompose. 

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Svava Tergesen, “Granny Smith, Arctic Char,” 2022

archival pigment print, 16" x 11" (private collection)

Her photos feature carefully structured sculptures or tableaus made from various edibles or painstakingly shaped pieces of food inlaid with collaged imagery from vintage women’s magazines, cookbooks and etiquette guides. Tergesen may even lay a skin or substance from one food onto another, making provocative and unexpected pairings, as in Granny Smith, Arctic Char.

Aesthetically, the imagery is rich, vibrant in colour, and almost excessive in its voluminous textures. Each picture is glossed with the kind of sheen particular to spun sugar, fatty charcuterie, creamy dairy products or fruit that has been split open. It is all so sensuous, yet it can also be gross. 

Dripping meats are twirled into loose rosettes and set in a vase with ivy in Soppressata Roses. The ends of a few salami flowers have come loose and hang low to the table like a dog’s droopy ears. You can almost hear the meat slap the surface as it drops. 

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Svava Tergesen, “Toffee Rose and Guanciale,” 2023

archival pigment print 40" x 26.5" (courtesy the artist)

In Toffee Rose and Guanciale, thick slices of pork jowl are posed in line with the flower’s dusky petals. There’s confusion between the skin-like surface of the flower, shot close-up to reveal its veiny network, and the pink meat marbled with beige pig fat. 

Barthes says magazine cuisine – images slick with glazes, sauces, icings and jellies ever so subtly garnished with cherries or carved lemons – use ornamentality to disguise the brutality of food, particularly meat. Tergesen has said she avoided depicting meat in her previous work because she is conscious, as a vegetarian, that such imagery can conjure death. In this exhibition, she confronts this association directly. 

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Svava Tergesen, “Ornamental Cookery,” 2023

installation view at Audain Art Museum, Whistler, B.C. (photo by Oisin McHugh)

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Svava Tergesen, “Ornamental Cookery,” 2023

installation view at Audain Art Museum, Whistler, B.C. (photo by Oisin McHugh)

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Like many, I’ve been swayed by the cottage-core rusticity of magazines like Kinfolk, which fetishize food more than they help you to cook it. Of course, this was Barthes’ point: the cuisine in your $12 magazine may as well be a gold watch in the pages of Vogue. It’s not meant for you: an ordinary reader.

I asked myself if Tergesen was successful in delivering Barthes’ critique. In that her photographs are so stylized the answer came slowly. But as I write, it’s apparent she makes his rebuke tangible, although perhaps ironically. As with most food photography in the Instagram era, it is such a pleasure to look at her work, which truly is not meant to be eaten. ■

Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., from April 1 to June 11, 2023.

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