Snooki; Ingredients: Orange Chicken, Liver, and Bourbon
Oil on Canvas

In this series, I painted glass containers filled with meat. In society today, we idolize many celebrities for simply being celebrities. We have a celebrity obsession in our society. Many celebrities and pop-culture icons become commoditized. They are packaged and sold to us much like the foods we consume. I created a personification of a prepackaged idea of the public images of several celebrities. I allowed the meat to embody a specific identity in the same way that we allow celebrities to embody identities. The jars become the preservation of celebrity. I created conceptual portraits of society’s view on these celebrities. The larger canvases contain portraits that had generally positive images and perhaps could be taken in larger doses and the smaller canvases contain portraits of celebrities who generally had negative images and perhaps could be taken in smaller doses based on their social image in 2015.

In celebrity culture, we tend to elevate individuals based on their appearance and less on their impact on the world. For instance, the celebrities that tend to have more positive identities still get scrutinized for superficial reasons. Still, we tend to elevate these same celebrities as godlike figures based more on their appearance than their talent, heart or contributions to society. Many people either don’t realize or don’t care that these same packaged commoditized celebrities are people just like them, with the same faults, foibles, and decidedly un-god-like qualities as them. Lastly, and quite obviously, I am playing up the concept that every one of us, celebrity or not, is really, at least physically, nothing more than meat in a container.