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.