Annie Maheux | Eat Art: Sharing Spoons
Annie Maheux
Eat Art: Sharing Spoons
Edge Gallery, September 2 - October 1, 2022
The pandemic has transformed our eating rituals. We do not share a meal with other individuals carelessly. The simple desire to meet and cook together never comes without a vague germophobic undertone. Saliva can be deadly. You are at risk of receiving the news from a sick guest few days after. It is even politically charged. In some regions, a romantic dinner is an act of rebellion against curfew regulations. Sharing spoons with a stranger is now an act of faith.
This exhibit is a test for all visitors. How oblivious are you to the new, global, hygienic attitude? The mouth masked or uncovered is a personal statement of a newfound attitude in Canada. But what about those small gestures that now make us twitch and feel a sudden discomfort? Hands to mouth, handshakes, spitting, coughing, during a meal? What is the current situation in the Yukon, a mostly isolated place filled with small close-knitted communities? A series of screens around the room display a selection of these alarming small gestures.
One table occupies the center of the room. The visitor is invited to sit down and take part to a hypothetical thanksgiving dinner. A virtual reality headset offers a neutral gateway to an instant embodied experience. Meeting through technology is often associated with the pandemic times. Blurred, often segmented dialogues across a table. A distant feeling of presence between guests. This virtual experience aims to recreate a similar feeling of dis-connection.
Coming out of the pandemic, we need to gather around the table and evaluate who we became toward each other. Do we consider our own body as a potential threat to others? We need to understand how two years changed trust for the world around us and outside of the Yukon. Let’s have a talk around the table.
BIO
Annie Maheux (she/her) is an artist living and working on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council (Whitehorse, YT). Originally from Montreal (QC), her work focuses on the act of eating in participative art performances. She hold a BFA in Design for the Theater from Concordia University in Montreal (2015) and a diploma in Professional Cooking from the Institut de Tourisme et d’Hôtellerie du Québec (2017). She recently completed a 6-month mentorship with the Grande dame of Eating design, dutch designer Marije Vogelzang. Annie presented her work in galleries and festivals and participated in artistic residencies in the recent years in the cities of Whitehorse, Inuvik, Eagle Plains and Montreal (Canada), Cape Town (South Africa), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Kassel (Germany), Sinthian (Senegal) amongst others. She is currently curious about eating puppets and making podcasts.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Annie’s practice is inspired by Eat Art, a 1960s artistic movement from Germany. She invites audience to reflect upon their subconscious eating rituals and the cultural identities it reveals. Hospitality and the notion of safe spaces are ground values of the immersive, sometimes challenging, environments she creates. Participants are often asked to ingest the artwork as part of a personal embodied experience. The act of eating is not to feed oneself but to have a reflection with all senses. For Annie, food is a powerful tool: extremely attractive and universal. The medium of performance mixes well with the alimentary material as they are both bound by time (decay of food and the duration of the performance) and often request a multisensorial approach. Past thematic explorations include the notion of privilege, criticism of the cooking industry, dog food, minerality, thermal exchanges, lust, the imagined food.
Past Exhibitions
