BmoreArt

After a 2018 visit to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Dyer was inspired by the Renaissance-era Vanitas paintings. She loved their over-the-top compositions filled with fruit, flowers, skulls, and meat, but also the vignettes of humans going about their daily lives in the background. Her favorite is The Well-Stocked Kitchen, with Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary in the Background (1566) by Joachim Beuckelaer. The painting teems with produce, poultry, and people preparing food, with a tiny scene in the background where Jesus speaks with Mary and Martha, clearly not seduced by the abundance of worldly pleasures.

Dyer has transformed the Vanitas still life genre for modern times by featuring today’s comestible objects of desire, emblazoned with elaborate packaging, logos, and text. Sparkling water, a middle-class obsession promising sensual pleasure and hydration with zero calories, is a generative symbol for the moment. Dyer portrays peppy La Croix cans and boxes, pale celadon glass bottles of Topo Chico mineral water, and Tiffany-blue cans of Vintage brand seltzer with a precarious specificity that makes them immediately recognizable, but also reshapes them into relics of fervent adoration, vague holy icons to the idea of health and fitness, of carbonated entertainment without the calories of soda.

“I am obsessed with the way people are obsessed with La Croix,” Dyer says. “It’s all in the packaging. It’s iconic! People want to be seen holding the can. There are loads of better-tasting seltzers but La Croix just nailed it with their design.”

The artist admits she is delighted by commercial package design, as well as Instagram advertisements, and is fascinated by their effectiveness. “I love how a product can look so good you almost want to keep it on your mantel (Chobani, I’m looking at you!),” she says. “It almost doesn’t even matter if the product is tasty or functions correctly.”

“I think about consumption in the form of ads on my Instagram, sponsored influencers, and well-designed packaging, but also through the lens of my past in disordered eating. Being someone who grew up binging, restricting, and obsessing over ‘clean eating,’ consumption for me feels both good and bad, like the concept of comfort itself.”

Dyer struggled for many years with compulsive eating and admits that, in her desire to control her intake, at age 17 she began to shave down the number of foods she allowed herself to eat until, at age 28, she was left with just one. As her list of approved foods shrank, her paintings swelled with “domestic landscapes crowded with health books and food wrappers and children’s toys, the paint itself bloated with glitter and candy and sea glass.” Her paintings became a meditation on disordered eating in an age of overconsumption. The artist includes other objects that are more obvious sources of temptation for occasional installations, combining her sculptures of three-dimensional cakes, candy, desserts, and snacks replete with their garish wrapping and conspicuous fonts and logos. When piled up all together, they coalesce into a teetering composition that mimics the overwhelming experience of shopping in a big box store, surrounded by piles of tempting goodies.

For Dyer, the idea of comfort is clearly a double-edged sword: both tempting and torturous. “Food is often a comfort, but it could mean making a nice dinner or binging on the couch,” she explains. “I watch puppy videos on Instagram a lot for comfort but that can easily turn to two-plus hours of scrolling in bed and disrupting my sleep.” Although Dyer believes that the excessive search for pleasure, especially via screens, is fine occasionally, she then questions the standards for occasionality, which, for her, leads to moderation and self-control. “At this point, comfort feels like an uncomfortable topic for me, although I believe it’s supposed to be a good thing,” she says.

In many images, the artist includes the ultimate object of desire: the smartphone held in a gnarled hand, displaying the intimate zing of a text message, the terror of a dying battery, the downward spiral of doom scrolling, and the way our devices have become simultaneously the ultimate barrier and point of access to the entire world. “Like consumerism, scrolling is an indulgence I love and hate,” she says. “I’m simultaneously trying to lean into it, but also setting little timers on my phone, which doesn’t work.”

Dyer explains that the act of scrolling can feed her work in productive ways because the various images, ads, and influencers reflect our current reality in an authentic and multifaceted way. “How we all show up with our little personalities on this little platform is wild,” she says. “Our world is experienced almost entirely through this little screen, especially after 2020. Maybe, probably, that is a bad thing, but it also is reality.” Dyer is intentional about depicting her phone in her paintings for this reason and her portrayal of texts, notifications, and tracking apps has become a specific marker of time. The artist has built an extensive archive of smartphone symbols and metaphors, with past work depicting her flip phone, iPhone 4, 6, and now 10.

For anyone inclined toward indulgence and asceticism, today’s screens tempt with ads for every kind of object of excess as well as the solution for every imaginable problem. Dyer cites her multiple obsessions with nutrition blogs, wellness influencers, YouTube workout channels, diet books and anti-diet diet books, smoothie recipes with protein powder, before-and-after transformation pics, and an abundance of photos of food.

“The infinite scroll goes on ad infinitum,” she says. “I can’t look away. Binge, restrict, repeat. Anxiety and confusion about the bodies we live in—what to feed them, how to move them, what they should look like—are not anomalies of our current culture, but symptoms of it.” Humorous, obsessive, and teeming with material culture, the paintings, sculptures, and installations of Nicole Dyer embody our collective obsession with having it all.