Zoë Schneider

Regina artist asks viewers to rethink their bias against fat people.

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Zoë Schneider’s art focuses on issues surrounding food and fat. “I think fatness is good,” says the Regina artist.

Not everyone agrees. Some people have called Schneider’s food-related sculptures and installations “grotesque.”

That word, with its decidedly negative connotations, makes Schneider bristle. She decided to fight back and began by researching the word's origins.

She made a surprising discovery. 

"Grotesque" evolved from “grotto” as a description of underground, cave-like spaces, specifically that below the Domus Aurea, the palace of the Roman emperor Nero. The palace was incomplete when Nero died in 68 AD and Roman leaders destroyed it shortly after, embarrassed by its decadence. 

But the lavishly decorated grotto beneath the palace was left untouched and forgotten until the 15th century, when a man fell through a hole in the ground and landed in the basement. It became a major tourist attraction. Among the visitors were famous artists, including Raphael and Michelangelo.

“Grottesca” or “of the cave” eventually morphed into the contemporary meaning of “grotesque.” 

A word originally considered “exciting and fun” has now become “abject and disgusting,” says Schneider, who earned an MFA at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon in 2018. 

Conjuring both the old and contemporary meanings of “grotesque,” Schneider created the makings for a grotto studded with loaves of bread, pasta and potato chips – popular carbohydrates blamed for making people fat.

Her exhibition, This Grotto Breathes, was supposed to open April 11 for a two-month run at Neutral Ground, a Regina artist-run centre. But the gallery was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it may be shown instead in August and September, before moving to the Estevan Art Gallery in southeastern Saskatchewan.

The grotto contains many elements. Several mortar-covered wooden panels of varying sizes are studded with bread, pasta and chips. Some panels will be set on the floor and others placed on the wall or suspended from the ceiling. There are shell-like sculptures created from molds of the artist’s own belly and a bread-encrusted working fountain.

Ironically, bread has become one of the more enduring symbols of the pandemic. So many people started to bake during the lockdown that stores across the country – even in wheat-growing Saskatchewan – were running out of flour at the start of the crisis. Some stores still restrict the quantity customers can purchase at one time.

Schneider has been using bread in her art for several years. “I started to work with bread as a metaphor for the body and also a metaphor for complex understandings of the values surrounding food,” she says.

For many people, home-baked bread is symbolic of a house filled with love. What better way to lavish affection on your family than to present them with a loaf straight from the oven? 

But a warning to visitors: Don’t sample the bread like some latter-day Hansel and Gretel. The loaves may look real but they are made from squishy foam. Schneider received a Saskatchewan Arts Board grant that she used to buy the many loaves she needed for the grotto. She has used real bread in previous work, but wanted this show to have a longer shelf life.

“This collection of works infers corporeality and an uneasy embodiment, references gluttony and class, and reluctantly engages with the concept of the grotesque,” Schneider says in her artist’s statement. 

“I am inviting the viewer to enter a space that could be unnerving, uncomfortable, uncertain or mysterious, but also enticing, leisurely, contemplative, tactile and alive, in hopes that a questioning of one’s own anti-fat bias may start to percolate.”

A change in attitude is possible, says Schneider, who points to how the meaning of grotesque has shifted over the centuries. 

“If this word can shift, maybe our perception of fatness can shift,” she says. “The grotto is an opportunity to look at the shift in language and apply it to the shift in perception.” ■ 

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