Erica Eyres
A feast for the eyes, if not the tummy.
Erica Eyres, “Can of Spaghetti,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
Erica Eyres serves up a range of white-bread tidbits in Family Meal, a veritable feast of junk food and sugary treats. The catch? It’s all ceramic and completely inedible. The show, on view at Calgary’s Norberg Hall gallery until Aug. 27, features a large table displaying some 60 pieces of glazed stoneware. Made to scale, the inventory includes everything from a bowl of Cheerios and a gleaming can of spaghetti to takeout coffee, a sliced pizza and a chocolate cupcake dressed with a large dollop of vanilla icing.
Erica Eyres, “Family Meal,” 2022
installation view at Norberg Hall, Calgary (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
Some pieces are more realistic than others. The frying pan (with an egg) might fool you, or the tarts. References to family include mom and dad mugs and a child’s cup decorated with a Smurf. Other intriguing elements are ashtrays full of cigarette butts, some with lipstick stains. Unlike another table filled with ceramic art, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, there are no place settings or chairs. Here, the pristine white tablecloth creates a sense of formality at odds with the casualness of a PB & J sandwich or a can of Dr Pepper.
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Erica Eyres, “Smurf Bowl of Cheerios,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
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Erica Eyres, “Frying Pan with Egg,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
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Erica Eyres, “#1 Dad,” and “Merry Christmas Mum,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
Eyres’ work seems to resemble the Western Canadian tradition of everyday realism, perhaps the ceramics of Saskatchewan’s Victor Cicansky or the still-life paintings of Calgary’s John Hall. But Winnipeg-born Eyres offers darker irony in her seemingly cheery facsimiles. The foods she recreates are largely unwholesome – heavy on sugar, salt and saturated fat – and often heavily processed. This understanding points the mind to current societal dysfunctions – the rising rates of childhood obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes, as well as the environmental crisis fuelled by capitalism’s system of extractive consumption, not least by the massive agri-food industry.
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Erica Eyres, “Ashtray, med w/ lipstick,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
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Erica Eyres, “Cheeseburger,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
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Erica Eyres, “PB & J,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
At first glance, Family Meal seems much different than other work by Eyres, who completed her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art and remains based in Scotland. She is known for emotionally acute drawings that target social awkwardness and vulnerability. As arts writer Sarah Swan wrote in a 2015 article: “Meeting the gaze of Eyres’ teenage loners or older women trying to look sexy is an encounter with loneliness. There can be terrible gaps, after all, between how we wish to be perceived and what people see.”
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Erica Eyres, “Chocolate Cupcake with Vanilla Icing,” 2021
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
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Erica Eyres, “Diet Dr Pepper,” 2022
glazed stoneware (courtesy of Norberg Hall)
Eyres’ videos, meanwhile, have explored popular culture tropes like dating shows and soap operas, riding an edge between cringe-worthy social interactions and painful truths about the human condition. Family Meal plays with that boundary too – we all know fast food is bad for us, but who hasn’t fed the kids a balanced, ahem, meal of hotdogs and doughnuts or horked down a cupcake and Coke at a job we hate, finding, in that sickly sweet, caffeine-induced trance, a brief respite if not actual pleasure. Family Meal is as much a cultural critique as Eyres’ other work – it’s just wrapped in a yummy trompe l’oeil. ■
Erica Eyres, Family Meal, at Norberg Hall Gallery in Calgary from July 16 to Aug 27, 2022.
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Norberg Hall
333B 36 Avenue SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 1W2
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