The Meat Shop

The Meat Shop: Verb List
Mixed Media

A Series of sculpture, painting, and digital images based off of a painting titled Meat Shop (2019). This painting is based off of the notion of how uncomfortable it is to view raw, hanging meat.

Verb List: To Hide
Spray Foam, Cardboard, Plastic, Wood

To Hide is a revisit of the verb list assignmentTo Prepare (2021). In this iteration I was encouraged to make major changes to the previous project and due to regulations within the exhibition space I could not hang anything from the ceiling. An issue that I ran into previously was that I wanted to make the meat form cow size, but due to spray foam supply chain constraints I was unable to get anywhere near that size. For a backbone structure, cardboard was used and spray foam was used on top to create the meat-like texture. Sheet plastic is draped over the wooden frame to create a sense of hiding the meat and not showing the viewer what it really looks like, similarly to how most slaughter houses do not allow visitors. A metal pan is placed under the form to invoke the idea that blood is flowing off of the form and falling into it. However, the pan is filled with cherry Jell-o which creates a sensory dichotomy between expecting to smell meat or a rotting smell but instead smelling what comes across as cherry candy.

Verb List: To Prepare
Spray foam, paper, charcoal

The prompt of this project was to chose a verb which prompts the creation a sculpture, a photograph, a drawing and an action. The chosen verb is "To Prepare", in the context of preparing a cow for slaughter. The meat form was filled with various bags of jello and covered with spray foam to create the texture. The action associated with this verb was stabbing or cutting the meat form. When the bags of jello were punctured the contents dripped from the form and into the bucket below.

Video of classmates participating in cutting the meat form.

The Meat Shop
Adobe Premiere

Have you ever considered where exactly your meat comes from? Like, really considered. Seeing a plethora of hanging corpses in a show room or in a meat refrigerator makes us squirm a little bit on the inside and it should. Imagine if humans were hung and skinned in a similar fashion.

Things That Could Have Been
Adobe Suite, Mixed Media

This short film is based off of Things that Could Have Been (2017) which is a Prismacolor illustration depicting 2 outcomes of an egg; a chick and a cracked egg. This film follows 3 separate timelines of different outcomes for a chicken egg while putting emphasis on the complexity and development process of a simple egg becoming a chicken.