WW9 – Sarah Nelson Wright

Sarah at The Newton Creek Armada

I am a Brooklyn based artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. I create interdisciplinary media projects about the urban experience that explore the changing city and investigate avenues for intervention. My work encompasses video, installation, interactive sculpture and public art.  My projects include THE NEWTOWN CREEK ARMADA (2012-2014) – a public art project exploring a New York City Superfund site; LOCATIONS & DISLOCATION (2008-2012) – a project chronicling displacement in the urban environment; and BROOKLYN MAKES (2009) – a site-specific video installation documenting manufacturing in North Brooklyn.  I have a BA in American Studies  from Yale (focused on representation & media) and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College (focused on socially engaged digital art). I teach Digital Media and Media Studies at Marymount Manhattan College.  WW9 is my second Wonder Woman Residency – for WW3, I created LOOK INSIDE.

My relationship with food changed drastically over time.  I grew up with a very fraught relationship to food and body image, but for the most part conquered those demons and repositioned food as empowering force in my life.  I experienced dramatic healing through limiting what types of food I eat, though currently I eat extremely omnivorously.  I love to cook, try new foods and eat with other people.

My proposal for WW9 engages with food prescriptions.  Everyone–but most especially women–receives constant advice about what to eat (and what not to eat) and how it will transform you.  For my project, I seek to reclaim this realm of food prescriptions from mass media and the diet industry for personal and cultural empowerment.  This is my initial proposal, which I look forward to transforming with the residency:

IF YOU EAT is an interactive installation that involves the viewer in the algorithms of eating. The installation is a light box poster with a cutout revealing a tablet screen in the center. The design of the poster, which remains static, invokes historic and contemporary advertisements for food and diets, with their promises of prescriptive transformation. As the view approaches the poster, they see that the screen contains advice about eating: “If you eat ______, then ______,” with the blanks filled in to create phrases structured like the ones above, but without the scientific prescriptiveness. They also find a button, which whenever pushed, changes the phrase to another identically structured phrase, randomly pulled from a hidden database. The database will be seeded at the beginning of the installation with food advice, collected from a diverse group of women including the WW 9 residents, that emphasizes culture and personal experiences with food, in contrast to the generic scientific advice women often receive in food and diet advertisements. In addition to being able to change the message on the poster, the viewer can fill in the blanks for the sentence – “If you eat ____, then _______” – with their own food advice. Once they type their phrase into a small kiosk screen, it will be added to the database of phrases that can come up for future viewers.