YOU ARE WHAT YOU CHEAT

You are What You Cheat, the solo exhibition of Lindslee, features representations of food, domestic objects, and one life-size sculpture of an obese woman, with a taxidermized duck on her head. Writ large and unnerving for their verisimilitude, such objects, bought and consumed mindlessly for their convenience and ubiquity, gain monumental proportions, absorbing symbolic value and power, alerting cognitive dissonance for their gigantism and unavoidable presence.

In these larger-than-life scenarios, the artist delves into the notion of belief and how it may or it may not necessarily correspond to objects in the visible world. In the work, “Rest in Peace of Mind,” dressed chickens are arrayed into a crucifix, which suggest how everyday goods become stand-in for materials of piety, inviting the tastebuds of a worshipful tongue. Art, particularly the medium of painting, is shown to corrode and decay, with a suggestion of a landscape breaking through the pictorial surface, titillating the eye. Such literalization of an idea transforms into a critique, what with the preponderance of choices available to us, temporarily satiating and perpetually displacing the fulfillment of our innermost desire.

You are What You Cheat explores the seeming profundity everyday life, through its million objects presented to us as seemingly inevitable choices, each couched in its own narrative. To what extent do they affirm or negate or own personal ideology? In mirroring the spectacle and even making it in perverse, through an approach that is at once tongue-in-cheek and alarmingly prophetic, Lindslee wishes us, the viewers, to see the gaps, slippages, and disconnections between our internal reality and that of the outside. Are there ways to harmonize the two or will they forever be locked as competing opposites? If we don’t turn into what we eat, the exhibition suggests that we at least become what we cheat.

by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana