Debbie.lee Miszaniec: Body and Mind

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Debbie.lee Miszaniec, “Earthly Delights,” 2022

oil on canvas (courtesy of the Gallery)

First Friday Red Deer Opening: November 1st from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. Artist will be in attendance.

Fall is the season of feasts, and Debbie.lee Miszaniec presents a lush abundance of dutch baroque inspired still life paintings of ‘forbidden foods’ in the Kiwanis Gallery. The exhibition focuses on the psychological struggle between the body’s needs and the mind’s direction when pursuing weight loss. A soft sculpture, tortured by these sweet sights, sits caught in the struggle between nature and diet culture. Is it the food which tortures the dieter, or is it a message from the body which only gets louder the longer it is ignored?

The paintings in Body and Mind mark the point at which one realizes that one has developed an obsession with food yet feels powerless to change it given the pressure to achieve/maintain the commonly accepted (BMI) definition of a healthy weight.

Debbie-lee’s Artist Statement:

Debbie.lee Miszaniec is an Alberta artist working in Calgary. She holds a BFA (2008) from the Alberta University of the Arts. Her paintings draw from her observations of the human experience, history and society as well as her own experience as a working class western female artist. In 2020 her series of drawings, the Covid Chronicles, documenting the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada, generated international attention. She was the recipient of a Calgary Arts Development Project Grant (2022) and a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant (2023) in support of further work exploring health and diet culture through the genre of still life paintings of food.