Opening September 18th in the Alternator Main Gallery is Grace With Holding by Robyn Jayne Miller.
Grace With Holding brings together Gelatin, the rendered byproduct of industrialized meat production, and a Western colonial dining room.
This work engages the social performance of dining in a world dominated by a history of capitalism.
The act of sitting down for a meal together inherently recalls ancient rituals held by firelight over communal meals many thousands of years ago: rituals connecting us to the land, to a process, and to an environmental referentiality. Tucked safely away from the elements, we gather around light and food, pausing for a moment in thanks before eating for whatever and whoever has brought this abundance.
Now enter your grandmother's silverware, only brought out for special occasions, venerated, ritualized, and guarded. Objects containing stories and ideals, some nurturing and others more exclusive. They may orchestrate table mannerisms that harken back to the domineering patriarchy of the early 20th century. They may also hold, in their ritualization, a respect for the generations of care required to keep them and their families safe for so many years.
Now consider the Medieval court at dinner, the dining hall of a late Victorian dandy, the financial elites of today eating at some absurdly fancy five star experience, or even the aspiring yet self conscious middle class family hosting dinner for their slightly richer neighbours. In these examples, the ritual of eating together has become a kind of impression management, losing some of the communal expressions of bodily connection, or the veneration of ancestors it held before. The ritual here serves instead to orchestrate a social difference in the diners: a king at the high table eating first, a dandy’s exclusive and impenetrable codex of proper social behaviour, the billionaire's million-dollar steak experience, and the debt-ridden parents' illusion of control in the good table manners of their five-year-old.
How something so natural as sharing food with one another can become such an entrenched ritual of a culture's structural hierarchies is a central question this work is facing. The question arises as to what other ways our bodily impulses and predispositions are adapted and capitalized on by people with the means to influence them.
A definite factor in this structure of control are the objects venerated by the societies they belong to: various utensils, plates and crystalware all arranged just so, for example. Though the objects alone do not impart the control, they do expose differences in the individuals that engage with them. Alienating those whose natural way of being is at odds with an object's design, or from whom its intricacies are withheld.
Of course there are many examples of objects in our culture shaping us every day, denaturing our instincts and restructuring the way we live our lives: Cars, Social Algorithms, A.I. ...etc.
The Gelatin is denatured by the same forces we are, and produced at industrial scales large enough to remove it from any common physical understanding. Here are the similarities between the re-casting of the Gelatin forms over and over again, and the forms we as people are cast in over and over by our societies. Though the Gelatin is malleable, it rebels, warping and cracking under its own directives and natures, bursting its molds, and remembering its material and animalistic past even through all it has endured.
The roles in this work are layered upon each other; the Gelatin as the body, as us, the Gelatin as the apparatus, the dining room, the Gelatin as food, the thing consumed, and the Gelatin as expression, the capacity to change.
Like a comic playing several characters at once, there is here an invitation in both jest and grave seriousness, to enter the masquerade of our own lives with a little more awareness for the many forms we take, the purposes they serve, and our own capacity to question, choose, and resist.
Robyn Jayne Miller attended the BFA program at UBCO, received their MFA at UVIC in 2022, and is currently based in the Okanagan (Vernon), unceded territory of the Syilx people.
Miller's practice explores connections between industry, the worker, and the natural world, with a particular interest in how these systems might be seen through the materials they generate.
By engaging these materials as active participants- ever-changing and competently generating ideas of their own - this work aims to question industrialization's impact on our physical, emotional, and psychological landscapes, endeavouring to establish spaces to expand beyond the limitations created by industrial values. Check out more of Robyn’s work on Instagram.