[Location] Garage 4141, San Diego, CA
[Exhibition Description]
Women are care-givers. Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives–we do the bulk of caring for others. We often look after the young, the sick, the elderly and the helpless. This Relational Aesthetics performance celebrates nurturers, and explores notions of dependence, intimacy, sensuality and privacy in the act of nurturing. It recalls being fed as children, and uncomfortably harkens to a future when we may be spoon-fed as elders. Wall pieces will also explore the idea of nurturing through food.
I am a feeder.
I get satisfaction, not out of eating, but from feeding other people.
I buy, grow, and gather food. I organize it in my pantry, refrigerator, studio, and car. I prepare it and serve it. I clean up.
I feel a connection to Prehistoric people who fed their clans through hunting and gathering. Feeding is etched into my genes.
I have two kids who eat a lot. I make their breakfast, pack their lunches, and cook their dinners, mostly from scratch. We hardly ever eat out.
I breastfed my children for over five years combined. One stopped on his own, the other had to be tricked into stopping.
My older child is 14. Three meals/day x 365 days/year x 14 is over 15,000 meals that I have fed him. He likes my cooking most of the time.
I fed my grandmother as she was dying. I brought her caviar, pate and everything expensive she liked. In the end, she stopped eating. I expect I will feed other sick or dying people before I myself am done.
I don't eat much. If I am alone, I eat crackers for dinner.
All this feeding would be fine, but it takes time and energy. Being a Feeder is incompatible with higher thought.
Breastfeeding, and caring for babies in general, made me crazy. It took over my mind and soul. Caring for sick elders can leave you brain dead.
I cannot both make Art and be a Feeder. Doing both kills me.
What is more important, making Dinner or making Art?
If you don't feed your children, you are a bad mother.
If you abandon your sick parent, you are a bad daughter.
Do I really have a choice?
—Anna Stump, Feeder
[Curator of Garage Gallery] Larry Caveney
[Artists]
Lauren Carrera, Moya Devine, Jeanne Dunn, Daphne Hill, Prudence Horne, Lisa Hutton, Susan Myrland, Kathy Nida, Terri Hughes-Oelrich, Therese Rossi, Anna Stump, Leah Younker
