At The Buffet
Maddie Lychek + Racquel Rowe
Main Space
August 29 – November 25, 2023
At The Buffet centres on the collective practice of Maddie Lychek and Racquel Rowe. Born out of early undergraduate art classes and late nights at pizza pizza, the duo place an emphasis when collaborating on food, fun and experimentation. With a shared interest of food as a medium within performance art, the two experiment frequently with taste, touch and texture. This all you can eat exhibition highlights key moments in their collaborative journey thus far and focuses on the materiality of food by emphasizing colour and form.
Drawing on histories of contemporary performance art Lychek and Rowe often make cheeky references and innuendos to other works such as Meat Joy (1964) by Carolee Schneemann and most recently Alison Knowles Make a Salad (1962). Offering the viewer another perspective or point of departure from the works.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Maddie Lychek and Racquel Rowe, How to open a can of cornedbeef, 2021, video. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Maddie Lychek and Racquel Rowe’s collective practice explores the intersections of play, identity, and food, often related to cultural, racial, and gendered norms. They explore questions such; What is the role of cultural signifiers in contemporary performance art? How can everyday materials be used in performance? How can they be used to connect seemingly disparate people, places, and ideas?
Lychek and Rowe hold an intrinsic interest in food and its relationship to the body, both internally and externally as it relates to performance. Using food as a medium allows them to expand and unpack on/reflect on their specific cultural upbringings, shared diasporic connections and the way that food informs who they are.
Food and the preparation of food is often gendered in many cultures. Collectively they research feminized labor and gendered roles/norms both inside and outside the kitchen.
They often think about the ways their respective diasporas connect them. Diaspora is used widely to describe people with origins from specific places, nationalities, and histories. They explore connections made across various diasporas, on account of comparable colonial histories, and climates, resulting in similar attitudes, and ways of life.
The exhibition will feature multiple works by Lychek and Rowe, taking a maximalist approach to their respective separate and collective practices, highlighting old and new works, some never exhibited and the emphasis not only on play within the exhibition but within the installation of the work, weaving worlds, story lines and different experiences for the viewer as they make their way through the show.
ARTIST STATEMENTS
Maddie: I am critically interested in the intersections between race, sex/sexuality, technology and power structures. Through my work I explore the multiplicities of my identity and prioritize experimentation, process, and conceptual thought over end result. My work takes the form of live and documented performance for video, various digital mediums that employ algorithms, such as social media or text-to-image AI engines. I employ performance art to engage with conversations surrounding power and play, exploring how a body and its consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery. I use social media as a playground for digital performance. I manipulate my body in order to exist within online platforms and challenge implicit biases within algorithms and digital censorship. With a practice-based approach to research I explore my gender expression, sexuality, and my Filipino-Slovakian heritage.
Racquel: My artistic practice and research are continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and my upbringing in Barbados. The work takes the form of performance, audio, video, oral storytelling, and other multi-media installations. I consider performative action as a form of exploratory, open-ended research that is constantly evolving. Basing my practice in historical research allows me to have a better understanding of contemporary relationships between Black people and specific cultural phenomenon, such as the ability to swim, as much of my new work takes place in the water.
Throughout my Master of Fine Arts and over the past year and a half I’ve been researching Caribbean identity within Canada and the ways in which community is shared and cultural traditions are kept alive and passed on, via food and oral traditions surrounding cooking. Much of my artistic output as seen on my CV, culminates in public exhibitions. These exhibitions often present me with many wonderful new connections in different communities where I often get to have conversations about shared diasporic connections amongst seemingly disparate groups of people. These conversations often influence future research and ways I go about making and developing work.
BIOGRAPHIES
Maddie Lychek is an artist and artists facilitator based in so-called Guelph, Canada. Lychek’s multidisciplinary practice involves performance, video, curatorial projects and various digital mediums. She explores the use of digital platforms as a mode of creation and performance in and of themselves. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts, in Studio Art with Distinction, from the University of Guelph and is currently the Program Director at Ed Video Media Arts Centre. Maddie Lychek has presented in venues across Canada and Bremen, Germany. Her work was recently exhibited at Xpace Cultural Centre, InterAccess, Galerie Sans Nom and Struts Gallery.
Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from the island of Barbados currently residing in Canada. She’s exhibited across Canada and holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BA(Hons) in History and Studio Art from the University of Guelph. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships during her MFA degree and most recently receiving grants from Ontario Arts Council as well as Canada Council of the Arts. Her current traveling exhibition The Chicken Is Just Dead First is showing in Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia.
THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From the artists: We would like to thank Ed Video Media Arts Centre for their generous support of our practices, as well as the University of Guelph Undergraduate Studio Art Program where our friendship and much of this work was birthed.