Peggy Feerick: Food Memories
CURATOR'S STATEMENT

Perhaps before your time, recipes were the alchemical formulas that insured family happiness and a woman’s creative fulfillment in her home.  In the 1950’s - what we now refer to as mid-century when speaking of artifacts of the period - everything about the home was embroidered with light, chirpy little tunes and cheery graphic motifs. Food, more than ever before, became cartoon-like and anthropomorphic. It grew to develop smiling faces and dance steps that it was able to accomplish through the aid of tiny arms and legs.  And it was always completely pleased to be eaten. If this sort of magic isn’t the stuff of alchemy, I don’t know what is.

Peggy Feerick is one of those holdovers from the days of sitting in a sun drenched chair in a shirt-waist dress to pore over recipes and plan meals. She is the quintessential hostess and nurturer. So these light jet prints (even this new technology has a Jane Jetson ring to it!) are very autobiographical.

In her compositions, she implicates little cookbook vignettes, several of which were similar to ones done by Andy Warhol early in his career, when he was Andrew Warhol. Originally intended to catch the housewife’s eye and imagination, they bounce off the page like schoolchildren with their hands raised for the recipe they accompany.

When you think about it, it really must have functioned as one of the sources for allowing the non-art world civilian to become comfortable with abstraction. The inner “contents” of the ink drawing of a glass or plate, or leg of lamb were always a shape of flat color floating not quite inside and not quite outside the matrix of the drawing. This had perhaps the effect of suggesting the housewife’s disciplinary role in getting it to go into its container. It also suggests that tastiness is a sensation that extends beyond the food item itself.

Feerick digitally manipulates these vintage drawings into a contrived affiliation with the original food item, and in doing so she is using process to demonstrate process. (She is food processing.) In contemplating the long-employed tradition of utilizing food to render vanitas statements about impermanence and the tragic condition of mortality, such as the Dutch artists, and Damian Hirst as well, have busied themselves at, I rather consider these works to be essentially anti-vanitas. They are about freshness as if it were something that could, would never terminate or become rancid. They are instead utopian.

The design and layout of her images is melodic in the way of a simple melody of the 50’s kind: musical notes spread out on a page like an introductory Wurlitzer songbook might offer a new musician. There is happiness in these works, optimism, sustenance.

Through Peggy Feerick’s Food Memories, everything is still where you left it, secure and waiting for you when you get home, including chocolate chippers and lemonade. Isn’t that reassuring?  Can we go home now?

Deborah McLeod

Curator