All you can eat
BY Jesse Kinos-Goodin
In his most recent installation, Attempt at an Inventory, Toronto artist Dean Baldwin turns gluttony into art. For a full year the self-proclaimed “foodie” photographed almost everything he ate and drank. (Meals grabbed on the run and snacks in dark movie theatres were exempted.)
The result is an awesome and disgusting critique of consumption— inspired by French writer Georges Perec’s Oulipian text Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four.
With more than 2,000 snapshot-sized digital prints covering the walls of the Contact gallery in Toronto, it’s hard not to first be overwhelmed with hunger, then revulsion. Do people really eat this much?
“It’s disgusting how much food one eats,” says Baldwin, who gained a “noticeable 25 pounds” while doing this project. “I started eating things I wouldn’t normally eat because I liked the way it looked,” he says. “The more decadent the better. For example, I had eggs benedict with lobster. Who eats that?”
Baldwin is now working on video projects that will continue to challenge the traditional ways we look at food.
