Shaddy: A Dramtic Love Story (video still), 2005.
A new video installation by artist Jessica Ann Peavy will debut at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY on Saturday, November 22. The 3-channel piece, titled Rituals of Consumption: Leviticus Rowed the Boat Ashore, investigates rituals of food consumption, raising matters of faith, space, and sexuality.
I recently visited Peavy's Washington Heights apartment to not only talk about the process of making
Rituals of Consumption,
but also to bake this
Sweet Potato Muffin recipe to which we added our own little twist: a spoonful of sweet potato pie filling in the center of each. We melted, shredded, boiled, mixed, baked and ate while chatting about her trip to Senegal--the catalyst for the new piece
--and her ongoing
Fatback series, which explores food in African American traditions and its effects on African American female psychology and physiology.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Peavy received her BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and completed an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and festivals across the country including Rush Arts Gallery, Brooklyn Arts Council, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and the International Black Media Festival in London.
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Contemporary Confections: Let’s talk about your project for Smack Mellon, Rituals of Consumption: Leviticus rowed the boat ashore. You were one of their artists in residence, correct?
JAP: Yes, last year.
CC: Does every Smack Mellon resident get a show after their tenure?
JAP: No, you are not given a show automatically...This show [presents] three artists that work with performance or perform in their own work.
Rituals of Consumption: Leviticus rowed the boat ashore (video still), 2008.
CC: If I remember correctly, this is the piece that you started will in residence with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.
JAP: Yes. [At Harvestworks] I started working in Max software, which is amazing. I started off doing the crazy thing that a lot of artists do: thinking that I could learn Max, so I would not have to pay someone if I wanted to use it again. Max is a program that basically lets you design software for something you want to do, but for which nothing currently exists; you can build your own software program in Max.
CC: So can you take components of existing software and put it into Max to create what you need?
JAP: I don’t think so…well if you know the code.
CC: So if there’s an open source code, you can pull it into this program?
JAP: Yes. I feel like the reason I had such a hard time trying to learn it is because I don’t know Java and I don’t really know code at all. I just know Dreamweaver, which does the code for you.
Muffin mix before stirring in shredded sweet potatoes.
CC: Yeah, it takes a certain kind of brain to understand that stuff.
JAP: It’s a lot of math and more than I’ve done since high school. I fooled around for about 2 months, but I finally said, “Okay I’m going to have someone do this for me.” But that’s what Harvestworks is for, to allow artists to do things they don’t know how to do. I did the videos in Final Cut Pro, but I had [Zack at Harvestworks] build a program in Max that would enable the videos to move when projected. I kind of think of it as choreography of the finished product.
[Rituals of Consumption] is something that started with the Fatback series and my interest in food and consumption in the African American community. When I got the opportunity to go to Senegal, I was very excited to compare and contrast food, consumption, and the rituals of preparation and eating.
CC: When did you go to Senegal?
JAP: It was in the spring [of 2008].
CC: Did you have a particular interest in Senegal beforehand or was it just a place you happened to visit while working on the Fatback series?
JAP: The opportunity to go presented itself and I was like excellent, this is going to be great for the work and where I want to go with it. I now have an interest in people of African descent that are not living in Africa and where [traditional] rituals can still be found [in the diaspora]. One of the things that’s been really interesting in my study of food here in the States is that many Black people reject pork saying things like, “Oh, I don’t eat scavengers.”
CC: I’ve never heard that before.
JAP: Oh my god. Maybe I just know a bunch of really religious people that say that on a regular basis. As someone that ignores most things biblical, I just think "What are they talking about? That’s stupid." But you and I were just talking about the Black church and how powerful it is. I would ask these people why they didn't eat pork and their response was “Well, the Bible says you can’t.” So, I went back to the Bible and the verses are actually in Leviticus, which is kind of the priestly code of the Bible. It's here that you can read about the clean and unclean, sexuality, and all these things that have to do with cleanliness of the body. It’s actually quite comical. I think it’s funny anyway. [To paraphrase,] "If it crawls on earth, if it creeps on earth, then it is unclean." What does that mean, "creeps on earth"? "If you eat something that creeps on earth and you wash your hands before evening then you are clean, if you do not wash your hands then you are an abomination." Or you’re an abomination until sundown. That is so insane. So I’ve created this equation out of it--sort of how these scriptures read--for my new video. If you’ve seen my videos before you know that I use a lot of repetition. That’s kind of the satire for me. Sometimes if you say something over and over it sounds ridiculous. Part of this piece is me quoting from Leviticus, repeatedly saying "abomination" [and phrases that dictate the code for cleanliness in food intake and the laws for sexual activity.] The three video channels move across three walls, creating a narrative as images shift and then, at certain points, altering that narrative. It has this temporal, or atemporal, thing happening.
Sweet Potato Pie filling.
One of the things I noticed when we were in Senegal, not in the main city, but in villages on the outskirts, was that eating was more communal; all of us were eating out of a large dish. During this time [the hosts] would play a prayer. We thought it was music, but after a while we realized that it wasn’t. In the U.S. we tend to pray before as opposed to throughout the meal. It made me think about how much of that you keep with you when you go to other places and how rituals are spread, particularly through food.
So this piece has photographs that I took while I was in Senegal. I’ve placed myself against them as backgrounds and I'm doing these sexual moves. The Black woman is an over sexualized figure anyway, but I'm relating the way you carry your body back to Leviticus in which, as I said, there's issues of sexuality. There’s photographs of food, [landscapes, and meal preparations], me reciting what the rules are for these food things, and ultimately the sense of over stimulation that I was feeling in Senegal, witnessing Muslim and Christian rituals, being African American and going to [West] Africa, and spending a lot of time at
Goree Island while I was there.
CC: Where you raised in a Christian home?
: My grandparents went to church, but my parents were kind of whatever about it.
CC: Where are your grandparents from?
JAP: The South. My mother’s mother, who is Native American, raised my mother Catholic. She hated it so much. But Catholic school in Ohio in the late fifties...when she talks about it all she talks about is being beaten and called a nigger. That’s pretty much her only recollection of it. My father was raised in Baptist church in Akron, Ohio. There was definitely a large influence even though I didn’t go to church regularly every Sunday. I think I have some rejection of it happening.
CC: Will you continue to investigate ritual in the United States?
JAP: I will continue to study wherever I can go. Rome is definitely on the list of places that I would like to go. I am interested in studying the rituals of African Europeans. Somewhere I read that only twenty percent of Africans practice any sort of traditional ritual.
CC: So while these muffins are baking, let’s talk about how the Fatback series began.
Peavy with fatback in hand.
JAP: I was looking at statistics one day and I always thought the number one killer of Black women was HIV or cancer, but then I found that it's heart disease and obesity. That's a silly way to be dying, because it's something that you can control. There are so many things that we can't control, so don't die by what you can. I was taken aback by those statistics. In 2005 or 2006, when Beyonce had all this bootyliciousness happening and J. Lo's ass was like that talk of the town, I was listening to black people in general talk about how their ass like this precious asset. "I'm not fat, I'm just big boned." Any way to get out of calling yourself fat when in fact you really just might be fat. I decided that we cannot continue to eat foolishness and justify it because Black and Latina women are supposed to be larger by nature. Now, to have a little extra hip and butt, yes, for sure, but there is a difference between obesity and just having a little more. Doctors will tell you that women with extra weight around their thighs and butt are not necessarily unhealthy. But it's the stomach weight, because it surrounds your major organs, that's unhealthy.
I decided that I was going to go on this crusade. I had always performed in my work, but never in public and not with like minded art people. So, I decided to do a performance in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem.
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. gave me the money. Me and T. I. Williams, a natural foods educator, made videos in which we cooked with fatback. One of the things we talked about in making the videos is that you can only find fatback in New York City in Harlem, Washington Heights and maybe on Flatbush. We made biscuits with lard. Paula Dean served as inspiration, because her recipes call for like two bars of lard. In the park we gave out these videos on DVD with postcards that listed the statistics for black women in particular who have the highest rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other issues related with being overweight. I don't feel like it's talked about very much among the Black community like education, and...
CC: Health care?
: Yes. We don't deal with it as much as we should.
CC: In the statics that you found, was it that women died because of their diets or because they lacked the health care and education to get that in check before it was too late?
JAP: A combination. I think a lot of it is denial too. We're so anti the European aesthetic of being super skinny, but we've gone so far past that, because we can never be that. To feel good about our bodies we have embraced this notion of thickness that if you don't watch can sky rocket into obesity, especially, if you don't live some where like New York City where being obese is almost unacceptable and you don't have a job that puts you in certain circles in which you
can't be overweight.
It was really great at Marcus Garvey Park. It was supposed to be a performance, but people wanted to talk, so it turned into food counseling sessions of about half hour conversations with people you might just pass by and don't really think about.
CC: Were people receptive to what you were saying?
JAP: The men were. You know the men in the park playing dominoes.
CC: Yeah, they want to talk to a pretty lady.
[Laughter]
JAP: Yeah, but they ended up being really healthy conversations. One of the things a lot of people would say is that healthy food costs too much money, it's too expensive. I understand that and to a certain degree it is, but there are some things you can change. Olive oil doesn't cost that much more than frying or canola oil and you don't have to fry everything. Food education is something that I've been trying to teach my students. Until we get universal health care everyone should be careful about what they're eating.
CC: So what are you doing with the Fatback series now?
JAP: Fatback has turned into other interests that I have in food and has become more global. I consider the piece I just finished to be part of the Fatback series. I feel like my interest in obesity and disease is now not as strong as it my interest in ritual. For me, it's about [food history], trying to figure out why people eat the things that they do, especially African Americans. I don't really have finite opinions about anybody, it's more about discovery for me. My only opinion is that we're all going to die if we don't figure out how to eat better and educate people about that. Is art the right vehicle fo this? I don't really know. I feel like the people I'm talking to are not the people going to my shows. Unless I stay in Mount Morris Park every weekend to do this, am I really making a difference? [...]
"Rituals of Consumption" is on view at Smack Mellon through January 4, 2009.
Sylvie Fleury, Le Caddy, 2000. 
