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'𝓤𝓷-𝓜𝓪𝓭𝓮 𝓦𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮' - 2024, Bronze, glass, embroidery, edible and non edible art. Music: 'Sweet Dreams' - Eurythmics.

Spring Break New York ‘24 Submission - Pending Selection

‘Moena Moxham’s '𝓤𝓷-𝓜𝓪𝓭𝓮 𝓦𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮' is an immersive, multimedia performance installation which asks us to consider our relationship to sugar as one coded with bodily memory. Viewers are invited to touch and occasionally consume exhibited objects, and reflect on how food can function as a self-healing rite of high worth that links our interior world to an exterior one.

In this seminal piece, Moena Moxham explores the transformative power of making and sharing food – specifically sugar – while also processing generational and gender-based trauma. Her internal experiences of pleasure, pain, and expectation are presented externally in tactile and perishable objects which viewers are invited to interact with.

Her installation takes the form of a formal dining room. An assortment of carefully constructed high-tea related objects fill the table; candles, cake stands, plates, floral arrangements, and handmade sweets. Each object is unique (not editioned), and connected to a core relationship. Lovers , mothers, and friends are represented in cakes, buttercream flavors, and floral motifs. While one part of the work is static and inedible, other parts are ephemeral and consumable, with the differences between the two being almost imperceptible to the eye. The objects sit on a hand-dyed and embroidered antique table cloth – an ongoing portrait of love and labor in the domestic space. Viewers can participate in timed ‘high tea’ sessions on-site with the artist, during which consumable items are eaten, replenished, and replaced, and personal histories of food and family are offered up and shared. Marks, stains, and crumbs left on the table cloth by these interactions are embroidered over as a way to memorialize and validate the process.

This body of work – which comprises Swiss macaron both edible and in bronze & glass, a blown glass vase through bronze coil resembling a beating heart, and other sculptural components – is replete with an expansive universe of detail and subtext, writ large for audiences through its staging as a lush and intimate experience as a tea party. As a self taught accredited patissier and pastry chef, Moxham spent years reflecting on expectations placed on her by consumers, but also by family members in her role as daughter, and more recently, mother of two. Her artwork, completed through the same micro-actions as a chef in the kitchen, reflects the pendulum swing of one moving between the joy of creation and the constraints of production.

A number of works are, in both their making and existence, representative of the dissonance and destruction inherent in food culture. The various components are extensions of pressure and resolve – kintsugi (the Japanese art form of repairing cracks in objects through the application of precious metals), the use of modes riven with difficulty (high heat, delicate materials), and a vehicle (sugar) present for many years as she struggled with and overcame eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Moxham departed from food production as a profession and into a meditation on it as an art practice – one that allowed for reflection on her role as creator/provider, on the decadent luxury of desserts, and on the catharsis of a highly controlled act of creation being obliterated once consumed. An ‘undoing’ while making.

The kitchen and dining room are loaded female spaces; they are traditionally associated with maternal provision, abundance, sweetness and femininity – the nourisher, the provider, the goddess. Moxham has expanded on these to include the industrial kitchen, the bronze foundry, the glass oven, and a literal presentation of the body for consumption (a number of the edible items are casts from her own body). The making of the objects, intimately connected to the artist, are a reminder of the limits to which said body can be pushed. They are also concealed within a broader context of manners and formality, and reflect on fading value systems. What is performed in the kitchen is often external in that it provides for others; but can sometimes absorb the psychological, the psychosexual, and the interior life.

On one level Moxham engages with the legacy of 60s/70s feminism, gendered tropes, and sexism; but she is much more concerned with a reclamation of agency through commonly fetishized forms – cakes, lace, the female body, and silver service. And like Marinetti’s 1932 Futurists Cookbook, in which the act of preparing and serving food was itself radical, creative, and bound by social contracts unless altered by mood, sound, light, and company, she wishes to involve the public.

As a trained flight pilot and avid motorcyclist, Moxham is keenly attuned to calculations of risk. Whether in speed, gravity, fluctuations in humidity, or the requirements of the lost wax process, each decision is an assessment of value and gain, as well as an ongoing exercise in self-trust.

The interactive component of the installation is a way to invite viewers into this dialogue – to ask what value is placed on a consumable given our relationship to the maker. Robust objects in industrial materials co-exist with fragile, perishable items. A bastardized tablecloth, fantastical hybrid edibles straddling the natural and synthetic, and the artwork itself being eaten and transformed; '𝓤𝓷-𝓜𝓪𝓭𝓮 𝓦𝓲𝓽𝓱 𝓛𝓸𝓿𝓮' encourages participants not to fear cycles of change or the internal being externalized.

❧ written by curator Sophia McKinnon

Curator’s Biography

Sophia McKinnon (she/her) is an arts writer, visual art and performance curator based in New York. As director of programs and publications with an art space in New York, she regularly produces film and poetry events, as well as artist monographs. She is primarily interested in interdisciplinary artist practice. Her work with the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015-2017), New York, and the Guggenheim Museum (2017), New York, focused on oral histories through experiences with public and community programs. Her 2014 program The Colorists (Wellington, New Zealand) linked local artists with children in a multi-day series of devised public artworks and activations, as part of Urban Dream Brokerage. Previously working in China, she was part of the selection committee for the first Curatorial Intensive there in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI) New York (2012), and led ‘Beijing Bai Ye’ a 24 hour showcase with 24 artists and venues as part of the Jue Festival (2013). She also curated the inaugural Festival of New Zealand Filmmaking in Beijing (2014), with the support of the New Zealand Ministry of Culture and Heritage. McKinnon holds an MA in Art and Art Education from Columbia University Teachers College, New York.

Vase glass by Joseph Pecoraro of Long Island Glass, Glass roses & leaves by Emily Doerflein, Carved candles by Mary of Zee Candles, Bronze cast with the fabulous duo Michael & Kristen of Wellsculpt Foundry and machine embroidery by Mark of the family owned and operated St James Embroidery. Collaborating with these phenomenal artists has breathed life into my vision- I couldn’t do it without you all- thank you so much!

This artwork was shortlisted for Spring Break New York 2024