"Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic"I took an art history class in England that discussed 17th century art focusing on Rembrandt and the Dutch School and I learned that the term Vanitas originally described still-life compositions of rotting meat and game, guttering candles, and skulls. These paintings bring spirituality to life and were intended as meditations on the fleeting nature of life as well as the inevitability of death. By calling this work Vanitas, Sterbak is stating that her work stems from the alienation that humans feel from their own flesh, aging, and mortality. Here, the natural aging process takes place before our eyes as the meat passes from a raw to cured state.
Women, fashion, consumption, and the body are key components to her work "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic." The equation of women with meat and the notion that “you are what you wear” are common ideas and there are a growing number of young women with eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia because their body types do not match the prevailing fashion or the “look” displayed by models populating the media.
Over the span of the exhibition, the aging process drastically changes the appearance of the work. The dress was stitched together from 60 pounds of raw flank steak and must be constructed anew each time it is shown. Following a centuries-old method of food preservation, the meat is heavily salted and allowed to air-dry. I like Sterbak's work because it reminds me of surrealist photographs which took the epitome of fashion and displayed it in different ways on the bodies of women. I think of the photographs of Lee Miller taken by Man Ray. Often times he would have her positioned in ways so that it looked like one of her limbs had been amputated or so that the viewer just focused on a part of her body which did not lend to her being viewed as a person, but rather as an object.
Women, fashion, consumption, and the body are key components to her work "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic." The equation of women with meat and the notion that “you are what you wear” are common ideas and there are a growing number of young women with eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia because their body types do not match the prevailing fashion or the “look” displayed by models populating the media.
Over the span of the exhibition, the aging process drastically changes the appearance of the work. The dress was stitched together from 60 pounds of raw flank steak and must be constructed anew each time it is shown. Following a centuries-old method of food preservation, the meat is heavily salted and allowed to air-dry. I like Sterbak's work because it reminds me of surrealist photographs which took the epitome of fashion and displayed it in different ways on the bodies of women. I think of the photographs of Lee Miller taken by Man Ray. Often times he would have her positioned in ways so that it looked like one of her limbs had been amputated or so that the viewer just focused on a part of her body which did not lend to her being viewed as a person, but rather as an object.
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