One of the beginning factors for Arden Surdam’s modern exhibition at Haven in Montauk turned into the 2018 Chaïm Soutine exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York titled Flesh. The Soutine exhibition featured lifestyle artwork that integrated striking birds, beef carcasses, and crayfish within the artist’s compositions. Surdam was developing her very own nonetheless lives. While she obtained the feedback that she needed to push the boundaries in her work, she looked at the suggestion exhibition.
“It sincerely blew my mind,” stated Surdam, who embarked on a series of works that checked out the cultural hierarchies within the international. Titled Offal relating to organs and entrails getting used as food, the collection is on Haven’s view in Montauk via Labor Day. Surdam had her own experience staring at the complicated dynamics of class within the Hamptons’ meals industry. At the same time, she lived there together with her then-boyfriend, who’s a farmer.
“It’s a lovely place,” she stated. “It’s a complicated area East highlights 5 of Surdam’s photographs that function seafood as subjects, jumbled together with items like images from cookbooks from the ‘60s and ‘70s, antique dildos, and picnic blankets. Surdam took Document on an excursion East, explaining the rationale behind her still lifes, the objects within them, and the complex courting between meals and class.
The Buffet
I knew I desired to do a bit specifically approximately oysters, and oysters are very licentious—vaginal and sexual…When I become mentioning the Soutine piece, it turned into because once I became looking at these exceptional backgrounds,,, and I always use fabrics as my backdrops. It offers it that sense of textuality, fluidity in which it feels love it’s wet. For this piece mainly, because I became in Galveston, Texas, which is a barrier island, there are lots of oysters and seafood there to which I had to get admission.
There’s a record in portraying referred to as Feast of the Gods, where [artists depicted] deities that might accumulate around and devour oysters, and it was very sensual. That’s something that I became referencing in particular. When I do cutting-edge takes on nevertheless life, I frequently try to consist of little moments that are like nods to the viewer if they, in reality, step into it. This [glass piece] is an antique butt plug. This might be the most sexual piece, which I don’t think most people realize first of all.
Fish Descending
I wanted the viewer to take into account that, nevertheless, lives circulate. When you take an image, mainly when you’re using rotting materials, natural substances, it’s without a doubt sanitized. They’re grotesque, but it’s now not like you’re smelling what I’m smelling within the studio. It’s gross. Also, I’m using these things which are slippery and bloody. I desired to do a nonetheless existence where I turned into honestly taking the viewer through how the gadgets are moving, so there’s congealed pork blood, and regularly it’s going to slip off. I’m simply interested in questions of cultural patterning and hierarchies associated with food.
For instance, the congealed pork blood is something I got from a Korean marketplace. Oftentimes I’ll add an image within an image, and I’ve been slicing out pictures from Time-Life books from the ‘60s and ‘70s about what state-of-the-art cooking need to be. In New York, when you speak about cultural, historical past, it’s related to meals. My mother always microwaved bacon, so it changed into by no means greasy. Their notion was top food, or state-of-the-art eating became very Eurocentric; it became very French and Italian delicacies. Everyone in these books is depicted as white. I was inquisitive about incorporating that with substances that are not Eurocentric, which can be from different sector components, and critiquing what we bear in mind as delectable and ugly.
Liver I
This is a picture from a 1970s cookbook. There changed into a chain of 5 pix [depicting] this girl ingesting a lobster. It became an instance of how you should consume lobster, and I positioned it on the liver, which turned into now not taken into consideration to be part of high delicacies. Now, of course, [it’s] what you’ll find in state-of-the-art Brooklyn eating places. It’s truely interesting while cooks start to reincorporate food that was otherwise taken into consideration undetectable at the latest places. I wanted to juxtapose this within the body. The rose and these branches are matters that are discovered frequently in conventional nonetheless lives.
