JOSH JARED

Bio

Growing up in a highly-populated area in the center of America, I lived in a world of juxtaposition. My hometown is filled with luxurious homes, but only a ten-minute drive will send you into some of the dirtiest places. Cedar Rapids has been hit hard by natural disasters and poverty. Hundreds of empty houses line each other near the river district, where the flood occurred.

    Although lives were lost and houses were left to decompose, the city continued to grow in other areas, ignoring the poor and the black in the dust within the meantime. They built shopping malls and more restaurants to fill the “need” of our people. These kinds of events have always led me to creating and trying to find a meaning through social change.

    I’ve always been interested and scared of the way our society rapidly changes and forgets our past. By witnessing devastation and also being a part of it, I learned a lot about the way our own government can and will treat us. Were seen as products with barcodes on our necks. By living in poverty, I’ve been a part of this group, striving for a better day where the people are finally given a chance to speak.

ARTIST STATEMENT

You Are What You Eat

My current body of work sheds light on the concept of fast-food consumption in American Culture and its effects on consumer behavior and our bodies. The average American is told to consume in order to achieve freedom or a certain social status. This vicious cycle of consuming “attractive” food, along with owning valuable material, has been fed to us as a reflection of our social status or well-being. We don’t think about the food we consume, but rather we consume more in order to chase the idea of freedom. Over-consumption of processed or fast food has become a cultural norm, to reach a higher status, but in the meantime, we forget the affects they contain on our bodies with diseases such as Diabetes and Cancer.

My sculptures consist of “abject” qualities that show the vulnerability of the human body through disturbing visual symbols such as dismemberment and bodily fluids. These visual symbols become a physical metaphor to the effects of both consumer behavior and the damage of unhealthy foods towards our body. In some of my other work, I’m exploring replacing the consumer as the consumed product itself, showing that we can become what we eat. We consume to feel satiated in our western society. I’ve appropriated the very popular yellow “M” seen at McDonald’s and have placed it on their products that I’ve also blackened out. Through my process in sculpture, I’m able to make multiple pieces from the same mold, reflecting the mass-produced line of foods found in grocery stores and fast food restaurants.

These pieces reflect an issue of overconsumption in order to achieve greater status or

Thursday, February 9, 2017
well-being in American Society. My mass-produced products remind us of the social system

created by consumption, and also the effects towards our bodies we forget in the meantime.