Trouble in the Garden

Birth control pills and my mother's favorite flower, 2016

Altar, 2018

Silkie, melon, and jade, 2019

Caution, 2020

Red Sea, 2019

Red Beets and olive oil, 2017

Still life with pork, chicken, and jam, 2018

Golden apple, 2017

Oyster Surgery, 2016

My endoscopy, 2018

Digesting asparagus, 2020

Trouble in the Garden, Ressel’s new series of decadent compositions employs her signature means of visual world-building, in which food is not objectified, but rather depended on as story teller. Drawing on the histories of Dutch still life painting, food literature, folklore, and religious iconography, Ressel prepares a hedonistic feast of unanswerable questions asked through phantasmagorical compositions riddled with ecstasy and repulsion.

Compounded with Ressel’s practice of summoning imagery from historical texts and other

external sources, Trouble in the Garden is the product of the artist accounting for the very

personal nature of consumption, and digging deeply into the metaphor and cultural

significance which many foods bear. This body of work depends on food to act as a bridge

between the human world, the natural, and the gods; closing the gap between the garden of

one’s own gut flora and the Garden of Eden. Employing aesthetics which uncomfortably

occupy the overlaps in kitsch, carnage, and opulence; and building unlikely worlds as

disparate as Brooklyn rooftop gardens-turned-forests and DIY bumblegum shrines in

Catholic churches; Ressel taps into food’s volatile potential to signify ecstatic pleasure,

longing, repulsion, and pain.

– Jackiie Popjes, curator