art painting food stress cartoons millennial generation
Abstract:
For my senior thesis, I held a solo exhibition in the Patterson Gallery on Penn State’s campus titled “Magical Golden Singing Cheeses.” The works in the exhibition are a series of projected looping animations of food drawings that I rendered with a brush and ink, and colorized and animated digitally.
Although it is foremost a necessity for survival, food has been fetishized in contemporary culture. My historical research here focuses on the television cartoons of the 80’s and 90’s. The presence of these cartoons during the formative years of the millennial generation has caused the internalization of food as an emotionally charged object. I want to explore the unhealthy psychological implications of this phenomenon with regards to the mental and physical health of the millennial generation. By confronting the viewer with illustrations of food in this fetishized light, I hope to blur the line between visual and appetite stimulation.
