In Sick & Hunger

(In Sick & Hunger, 2000 (recreated and re-performed in 2011, gingerbread, royal icing, graham wafers, cardboard, 2x4 lumber, performance, conversation, eyelet lace dress, vintage apron)
I constructed a scale model of a suburban house out of gingerbread and consumed it while trading stories about the gingerbread house with visitors. I made the house big enough for me to crawl inside of and, potentially, to contain the gingerbread house's multitude of meanings: normative family structures, colonialism, consumption, fairy tale as metaphor, power and dreams. I ate the house for six days, translating the cookie into words in my mouth.

The title, In Sick & Hunger, is the result of a garbled phone conversation. It means nothing, but hints at so much: a dangerous collision of food, purging and insatiable need.

This was my first foray into artworks that encouraged an exchange and potential collaboration with the audience. This piece still strongly engaged with and traded off of the spectacle: the spectacle of monstrous female appetite and an overabundance of food.

I don't feel like I can unpack and chew over those statements right now, like a picnic lunch. After all, look at how much space they required of my little gingerbread house!

When I was invited to re-mount this performance at Montreal's Nuit Blanche in 2011, I decided to divest myself of the Gretel costume that I felt was a fetishized figure of femininity. Braids and eyelet frills were traded in for the very symbol of out-of-control consumption - a blinged-out Juicy Couture velour track suit. I offered pieces of my suburban gingerbread palace in exchange for an item to add to the shopping list I was reciting. (I ate so much gingerbread that I threw up a few times. By the end of the night, my house was almost completely devoured.)