Gina Beavers
Family Style

July 2–August 25, 2013


Beavers continues her body of paintings appropriating photographs of food from social media and images taken by friends or acquaintances to create works querying notions of taste. Family Style refers to the idea of sharing images and ideas, as well as the concept of “more than enough” in her never-ending source images and the generous amount of paint applied to her canvases. Beavers’ heavily worked still lives are always beautiful and often grotesque.

To create each 16 by 16 inch canvases, Beavers revamps a primary image, initially layering and building areas in thick swathes of acrylic medium. The canvases are finished with a specific rendering of the object on the dried form’s surface. The result is what New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes as an exaggeration and satirization of “both the act of painting and the fetishization of food by professional photographers and hungry diners broadcasting images of their meals before tucking in.”

The paintings within the exhibition are taken by an emerging shoe designer, a DIY crafter, a curator, a photographer, and an art lover, all of whom she follows on social media. Some are friends, others acquaintances, a couple she has never met in person. Regardless, she sees their pictures. They represent a creative class, a freelance class. This connects them. Only a fine line divides what they consume versus what they create. They are always selecting what we want to share, what their feed will look like, always self-aware, always self-conscious.

“People have told said these paintings look like ads. They are. People are making ads, for food, for a restaurant, for a lifestyle, and when ads look like art and art looks like ads, then life looks like ads looks like art. These life ads look like paintings to me.”