PAST CONVERSATION
‘Yummy’ Collage Workshop with Elizabeth Renstrom and Chelsey Pettyjohn
Location:
Date:
PAST CONVERSATION
‘Yummy’ Collage Workshop with Elizabeth Renstrom and Chelsey Pettyjohn
Join Baxter St 2023 Mid Career Artist, Elizabeth Renstrom, and artist Chelsey Pettyjohn at 4 PM on January 27th for a collage making workshop using imagery from a fictional magazine titled Yummy (Teen Edition)—which Renstrom created in collaboration with designer Elena Foraker and writer Coralie Kraft.
Yummy (Teen Edition)’s glossy images and catchy headlines were created entirely through AI—a model trained on a generation’s media consumption and synthesizing an imaginary world set in the realities of the early 2000s. Fashion spreads, photographs of teen heartthrobs, and dogmatic advice columns reflect the value systems promoted through media culture in the early aughts, reproduced perhaps as readily and uncritically by an AI model as they were consumed by young readers at the time. Brightly colored headlines, advertisements for beauty products, diet and exercise tips, and a homogenous array of teen faces fill magazine covers and interior pages in a context that is both dated and yet still reflective of much of today’s media culture. Targeted specifically to young women, these pages recall and reinforce a shaping of ideas about diet culture, desire, and self-presentation, while also underlining the inherently sexist, fatphobic, and racist themes present throughout.
Chelsey Pettyjohn is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in paint, sculpture, and collage. Her work engages a specific collection of self-made archetypes and iconography. Themes reveal personal history: childhood fantasies, forbidden sexuality, the verdant landscapes of a heightened inner world. She is interested in the juxtaposition of delicate and grotesque; articulating the human experience in all its innocence and brutality.
She holds a BFA from Parsons the New School for Design, and a BA from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. She has shown her work locally and internationally; exhibitions include solo shows at Hunter College and Tennis Elbow, as well as group shows with ATLA, Kapp Kapp, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Foxy Production. Her current two-person exhibition at ChaShaMa (NYC) is on view through February 24th. She lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Elizabeth Renstrom is a Brooklyn-based artist working across photography, video, and installation. Her work creates safe spaces that use identity to examine the effects of nostalgia. Through these spaces, she investigates the way we use images and how we craft our identities in relation to pop culture. Often her work contrasts themes of feminism with the pitfalls of commercialism. Renstrom replicates the bright pop of editorial photography within her personal work, inspired by years working in magazines. This, combined with elaborate sets and a touch of humor, become a tool to interrogate the advice columns magazines sell to young women. Renstrom published her first book, Carnal Knowledge, in 2020 with Prestel UK. Her editorial work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME, Instagram, and Vice, among others.