In ‘Offal, state-of-the-art look gruesome and subverts the Eurocentric records of picnics. One of the starting factors for Arden Surdam’s modern exhibition at Haven in Montauk became the 2018 Chaïm Soutine exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York titled Flesh. The Soutine exhibition featured still-life artwork that included fowl, red meat carcasses, and crayfish inside the artist’s compositions. Surdam has been creating her own life, and while she acquired the comments that she needed to push the bounds in her work, she looked at the exhibition for the concept.
“It virtually blew my mind,” said Surdam, who embarked on a series of works that looked at the cultural hierarchies within the international East, relating to organs and entrails being used as food; the series is on view at Haven in Montauk through Labor Day. Surdam had her personal enjoy staring at the complicated dynamics of sophistication in the food enterprise within the Hamptons. At the same time, she lived there along with her then-boyfriend, who was a farmer. “It’s a stunning region,” she said. “It’s a complex location.” Offal five of Surdam’s pictures characteristic seafood as topics, jumbled with gadgets like pictures from cookbooks from the ’60s and ’70s, antique dildos, and picnic blankets. Surdam took Document on tour East, explaining the reason in the back of her life, the gadgets within them, and the complicated relationship between food and class.
The Buffet
I knew I desired to do a chunk specifically about oysters, which are very passionate—vaginal and sexual…When I was citing the Soutine piece, it became because once I looked at specific backgrounds, I used fabric as my backdrops. It gives it that experience of textuality and fluidity in which it feels irresistible wet. For this piece specifically, because I am in Galveston, Texas, a barrier island, there are many oysters and seafood, too, which I had to get right of entry.
There is a history in portraying called Feast of the Gods, in which [artists depicted] deities that would collect round and devour oysters, which was very sensual. That’s something that I have been referencing particularly. When I do modern-day takes on existence, I regularly try to include little moments that can be like nods to the viewer if they certainly step into it. This [glass piece] is an antique butt plug. This is probably the maximum sexual piece, which I don’t suppose most people realize initially.
Fish Descending
I desired the viewer to understand that still, life’s passed. When you’re taking an image, especially while using rotting materials, natural materials, it’s sanitized. They’re grotesque, but it’s not like you’re smelling what I’m smelling in the studio. It’s gross. Also, I’m using these items, which are slippery and bloody. I desired to do a life where I turned into taking the viewer through how the gadgets move, so there’s congealed red meat blood, and often it’ll slip off. I’m interested in questions of cultural patterning and hierarchies related to food.
For example, the congealed red meat blood is something I got from a Korean marketplace. Often, I’ll add a photo inside an image, and I’ve been cutting out pix from Time-Life books from the ’60s and ’70s approximately what state-of-the-art cooking must be. In New York, while you talk about cultural background, it’s associated with food. My mom always microwaved bacon, so it became by no means greasy. What they thought turned into correct food or sophisticated eating became very Eurocentric; it became very French and Italian delicacies. Everyone in those books is depicted as white. I became interested in incorporating materials that aren’t Eurocentric, which can be from other arena elements, and critiquing what we don’t forget as delectable and grotesque.
Liver I
This is a photograph from a 1970s cookbook. There changed into a chain of five photos [depicting] this woman eating a lobster. It became an instance of how you should devour lobster, and I located it on the liver, which was not considered a part of high cuisine. Now, of course, [it’s] what you’ll discover in ultra-modern Brooklyn restaurants. It’s virtually attractive while cooks reincorporate food otherwise considered undetectable in modern places. I desired to juxtapose this in the body. The rose and these branches are found frequently in traditional stilllife.
