FOOD FACE
The McEachern Art Center introduces a series of archival work titled FOODFACE by artist and photographer Stephanie Sutton. Although this body of work was made in 2009, this is the first time the work has been exhibited in a gallery setting. FOODFACE is a series of diptych photographs that record the last thing Sutton ate and her face each day for a period of 6 months. This index was intended to create a photographic system of accountability for daily food choices and their direct impact on her physical appearance. She aimed to harness the strength in her creative drive to make a set of images for a future audience to witness and evaluate my commitment to changing HER diet. Instead of visible weight loss in the portraits, the timeline reveals the faces of waning hope, desperation, and ultimately the surrender to the all too familiar feeling of defeat. This first major series marks the clear beginning to her evolving research on the fat body, metrics of discipline, self-portraiture, and delusions of time travel. In addition, the secondary gallery behind the main installation of FOODFACE will include a series of video installations titled Heavy Set, Music Videos, You Could Be The One For Me, and Fit Tech. These works, both video and photography explore the work of Stephanie Sutton within the last decade of her professional practice as an artist.
Opening Reception
Friday, October 4th at 6 PM
Featuring brief artist talk by Stephanie Sutton
Light bites and refreshments will be served
McEachern Art Center
332 Second, Street
Macon, GA 31201
STEPHANIE SUTTON
Stephanie Sutton’s performances for the camera employ conventions of labor and ritual to complicate assumptions of discipline and destabilize virtues of self-control through the critical lenses of feminist theory, identity politics, and medical pathologies. Sutton's work is recognized for its success in transgressing the limits of the isolated subject and redirecting self-consciousness onto the viewer. Sutton earned her MFA from University of Georgia, and her BFA at Georgia State University. She is currently Assistant Professor in Photography and Expanded Media at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
“As a lens-based performer, I serve as my work’s primary figure, and accordingly, my art is both personal, grounded in my own specific experiences as a fat-bodied subject, and philosophical, using these experiences as a means of engaging enduring questions about subjectivity, alienation, and intimacy. There is also a political dimension to my work, which highlights and subverts the many assumptions the fat body compels. Most often captured in the form of installations that combine video and still photography, these performances contrast strict and demanding rituals (lawn mowing, mandala making, etc.) with seemingly indulgent behaviors such as excessive eating and dancing alone. As I argue, the fat body is apolitically subversive force, powerful precisely because of its radical, hypervisual noncompliance.
If the work develops from the particularities of my body, its ultimate goal is to probe the relationship between individuals and the many lenses through which we see and are seen.In support of broadly advocating for the transgressive power of the fat body, my work also renders visible the very invisible sensations of discovering one’s own body image, reflecting the plurality of positions with which the self can identify when the boundaries of subjectivity become blurry.”
-Stephanie Sutton.
OPENING RECEPTION IMAGES
COMING SOON
