Fork and Knife Artist Tess Barbato | Family Pack Chicken Tenders

Fork and Knife
Call for Entries Accepted Artists

Artist Tess Barbato

Brighton, Massachusetts

Family Pack Chicken Tenders
Mixed Media

Artist Statement
The title of my most recent series is This Week’s Special. Through compositional choices and painting style I attempt to provoke an involuntary visceral reaction. My work encourages the viewer to confront any predisposition of being repulsed by the subject. I chose to portray meat that was on sale because it exemplifies the excesses in our society. 

The greater part of our society has become so removed from the foods we eat, in particular meat, that we hardly consider its origin, processing, diet or slaughter. In general, we no longer buy meats from a butcher shop. Instead, we have supermarket shelves filled with pre-packaged slabs of already decaying animal products in Styrofoam trays wrapped in clear plastic.

We have become afraid to buy meats with today’s “sell by date”, let alone yesterday’s. We aren’t concerned with where those packages will end up. This practice eventually leads to discarding innumerable pounds of meat every year. My objective in this series is to highlight all of these unthinking practices while promoting more conscious food choices.

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