Vancouver's Svava Tergesen turns food photography on its head in Ornamental Cookery
Site-specific installation at Audain Art Museum is part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival
Svava Tergesen, Zanfirico Glassware (detail), 2022, archival pigment print. Photo courtesy of the artist
Audain Art Museum and Capture Photography Festival present Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery from April 1 to June 11 at Audain Art Museum
FOOD PHOTOGRAPHY SATURATES our everyday world, but Vancouver lens-based artist Svava Tergesen turns the genre on its head. Surreal food sculptures and still-life collages; decorative patterns of cut-up fruit and vegetables recalling wallpapering; and the folding in of fibre arts like crocheting, knitting, and weaving: her work makes people look at everyday objects in new ways.
Tergesen’s first solo exhibition is taking place at the Audain Art Museum as part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival. Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery takes its name from a 1957 essay by French social and literary critic Roland Barthes, who explored how food photography created a set of fantastical myths about cooking far removed from the daily task’s gendered and economic issues.
“He discusses the way women’s magazines of the period presented food as a stand in for an aspirational lifestyle while glossing over and reinforcing the economic and gender issues these types of images and magazines reinforced,” says the exhibition’s curator and Capture’s executive director, Emmy Lee Wall, in an interview with Stir. “By repurposing food imagery, Svava questions our relationship not only to food itself but also the social norms that accompany it.”
Svava Tergesen, Granny Smith, Arctic Char (detail), 2022, archival pigment print, Private collection.
Wall first discovered Tergesen’s work in 2020 at the Lind Prize exhibition at The Polygon Gallery. “I remember seeing a relatively small-scale image of hers on the wall, laid over a vinyl wall installation,” Wall recalls. “I was intrigued by the way she had expanded her imagery beyond the frame and also with her playful and symbolic use of food, something many of us take for granted because it is so ubiquitous. But I've long been cognizant of the way food is loaded with so much meaning and social significance. Gastronome Brillat-Savarin famously said ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.’”
A site-specific installation at the Audain, Ornamental Cookery includes large-scale collages assembled on-site and mounted directly on the gallery walls as well as smaller photographic images. Tergesen mixes her own photographs with repurposed found imagery from vintage cookbooks, etiquette manuals, online museum archives, and other sources, all to reimagine the familiar. Some of Tergesen’s works feature fruit cut into geometrical shapes and arranged in dazzling patterns more commonly associated with quilts or sweaters; others appear somewhat off-putting, in contrast to so many pretty food pictures found on social media. Subversive and playful, many trick the eye. All are highly-detailed.
“Svava’s works deliberately have a certain ‘look’, achieved, I think, in part because she uses imagery found from sources that are not contemporary including vintage cookbooks, magazines, and etiquette manuals she finds online or in thrift stores,” Wall says. “In this older source material, many of the foods are outdated and not particularly suited to contemporary palettes. The colour is also very ‘vintage’, which contributes to her aesthetic. I think this is a deliberate strategy used to question beauty and presentation styles, asking us to examine our current understanding of what is attractive to us and why.”
Svava Tergesen, Princess Cake.
Tergesen, who has a bachelor’s degree in math, has exhibited works at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, the University of Iowa, Scotland’s Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and The Halide Project in Philadelphia, among other places. She has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and at Vancouver’s Duplex Artist Society. Garnished Sundries, her 2022 exhibition commissioned by the City of Vancouver, was on view at 20 bus shelters. Ornamental Cookery will activate the Audain Art Museum’s upper floor.
“One of the reasons I was so excited to work with Svava is that the upper gallery at the Audain Art Museum, designed by Patkau architects, have very high, peaked ceilings and is quite an expansive space,” Wall says. “Svava was invited to mount a show specifically so she could create new work that would respond to this architecture. I think many people think of photographs as images that exist within a frame, and the way Svava works really expands that notion.
“One thing Capture is recognized for is supporting emerging lens-based practitioners, and it's really exciting to collaborate with someone through their first solo museum presentation,” she adds. “I'm really grateful to Curtis Collins, the Audain Art Museum's director and chief curator, for extending this opportunity and for providing this platform.”
Svava Tergesen, TV Dinner.
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