For Ernest Hemingway, a “moveable feast” referred to a formative experience of a place—in his case, Paris—that stayed with you long after you’ve left. For self-described artist-anthropologist Kate Pincus-Whitney, the enduring experiences that inform her paintings are literal feasts, too, centered around shared meals in her hometown of Los Angeles. Stuffed celery from Musso & Frank Grill, Nancy Silverton’s Caesar salad, French dip sandwiches from Philippe’s, and Roy Choi’s Kogi tacos from his first food truck in Venice are just a few of the dishes on the menu at Pincus-Whitney’s sumptuous L.A. debut at Anat Ebgi, on view through August 17th.
“What’s always interested me about painting food is that we are so disconnected from where it comes from,” Pincus-Whitney said during a recent walkthrough. “On every plate we sit down to eat, there’s politics, culture, and history.” The 13 acrylic tablescapes included in “To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home” strive to reconcile that distance.
To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home: Wednesday Farmers Market (From Tutti Fruiti to Pollan) or The Times They Are A’ Changing’, 2024
Kate Pincus-Whitney
Anat Ebgi
Like kaleidoscopic atlases, her compositions index the sociopolitical landscape in contemporary L.A. through the edible delights it produces and serves. To convey her critical engagement with both the economic and ecological impact of food, she depicts California’s superabundance of produce (think spring onions, nectarines, and melons) alongside books like Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food and Joyce Goldstein’s Inside the California Food Revolution.
The first painting the viewer comes to in the show, Wednesday Farmers Market (From Tutti Frutti to Pollan) or The Times They Are A’ Changing (2024), envisages a butcher block table overflowing with a bounty of fruits and vegetables culled from produce stands, community markets, and legendary farmsteads.
To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home: Round and Round In The Circle Games, 2024
Kate Pincus-Whitney
Anat Ebgi
To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home: The Real McCoy, 2024
Kate Pincus-Whitney
Anat Ebgi
Other works offer topographies of various L.A. neighborhoods’ robust culinary scenes. For example, Round and Round In The Circle Games (2024) explores the past and present of the city’s West Side, where the artist was born and currently resides after an extended stint in New York and Rhode Island. The crowded table features dishes from storied establishments and newcomers alike, including royal fried rice from Rutt’s Hawaiian Cafe and oysters on the half shell from Dudley’s Market. Alongside the iconic plates are painted reproductions of works by artists that defined the local imaginary and cultural mythology: books by Joan Didion, Joni Mitchell records, and a David Hockney painting of the Pacific Coast Highway.
Exaggerated, phosphorescent colors, trompe l’œil details, and a confounding lack of depth cause her loose gestural lines to reverberate, even shimmer, within the compositions, which play into the tradition of filling the frame, often known as horror vacui. “I’m utilizing still life motifs, but they’re not at all still,” Pincus-Whitney explained. Her interpretation of the genre is not so much about capturing a moment as foregrounding the vibrancy of matter and our psychological connection to the things we see. At times, the polychromatic plates, flowers, and objets d’art take on an otherworldly, fantastical sheen or appear as windows into someone else’s memory.
A variety of Pincus-Whitney’s personal experiences inform her mystical use of objects in her art. For example, she works with sigil magic (an occult divining practice) and sandplay, a play therapy technique borrowed from her mother’s practice, where she creates three-dimensional images with miniature figures in a tray of sand. “I had one of those silly a-ha moments when I realized my paintings were like my own sand trays,” said Pincus-Whitney. “They’re totemic, hermetic, and in dialogue with the unconscious.”
The largest painting in the exhibition, The Real McCoy (2024)—also her largest to date, at 96 by 72 inches—is, perhaps, the most personal. The colorful, fantastical banquet is inspired by the two halves of her ancestral lineage (maternal and paternal). Though both families were visual storytellers, connoisseurs, and California migrants, in every other respect, they were diametrically opposed: her mother’s relatives immersed in Hollywood’s glitz and glamour, her father’s with the bohemian art scene around Charles and Ray Eames.
At the center of the mesmerizing painting, a table emerges covered in dim sum from Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Trader Vic’s tropical cocktails, and homemade sautéed chicken. Here, regardless of history, sensibility, and taste, the two families can come together and share in a very movable feast. At Pincus-Whitney’s table, there’s something for everyone.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/SmpeUds
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