Laura Rokas: A Meal in Itself

In the project room, Laura Rokas: A Meal in Itself is the artist's first exhibition with Rebecca Camacho Presents. Excavating vintage Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers recipe cards, Rokas painstakingly recreates 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 also 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. 

Rokas's interest in relationship power dynamics reverberates throughout her practice, as does a fastidious dedication to craft and technique. Each of her intimately-scaled paintings further the point that food can conjure memories, connections and emotions that are far beyond the grasp of language and rational thought. Rokas expertly utilizes accessible kitsch to examine the intricate questions of self, ambition and status, sacrifice and self-sacrifice, and perfectionism.