Laura Rokas: A Meal in Itself
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
With A Meal in Itself, Laura Rokas excavates vintage Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers recipe cards, painstakingly recreating these bygone images in oil paintings on paper. Taken largely from the 1970’s, these strange and oftentimes abject concoctions are representative of a time in which women entered the workforce in large numbers while still carrying the sole expectation of family care and social entertaining. The rise of recipes built upon convenience ingredients and packaged foods aligned with a new sense of modernity and busying lifestyles, while still representing a desire to awe and impress. By depicting these images in the idiom of painting, Rokas also wades into a larger history of art centered on food, from Dutch still life painters such as Pieter Claesz to dessert aficionado Wayne Thiebaud, who each tackled, in many different ways, the question of what we eat and more importantly how we picture what we eat and what it says about us.
Selected Works
