Earthly Delights: Claire Rosen, Amanda Marchand, Torrie Groening, Margeaux Walter, and Kelda Van Patten

The banquet is a historically defining characteristic of culture and conjures up vivid and colorful imagery, plentiful food and wine, exotic recipes, lavish presentations and glorious surroundings. The evolution of formal dining begins in the medieval era, where dining became a sign of social status. A change in society had emerged during the era of the Middles Ages when travel, prompted by the Crusades, led to a new and unprecedented interest in beautiful objects and elegant manners. This change extended to food preparation and presentation resulting in epic food arrangements with exotic colors and flavorings. Again, a boom in exploration and colonization in the Victorian Era yielded an interest in the exotic “other”, a fascination which also extended to animals and the natural world. The wealthy began to fill their houses with costly, splendid goods, their table settings became more elaborate and dining became a pageant in its own right.

This series of whimsical panoramic photographs depict animals reveling around elaborate banquet tables, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, "The Last Supper” and by Pierre Subleyras classic painting, “The Feast in the House of Simon”. The intricate table spreads are carefully arranged, in the style of dutch still life paintings of the 17th century. The series features anthropomorphized creatures great and small; from Elephants enjoying piles of peanuts and large stacks of peanut butter sandwiches to Honeybees swarming miniature trays of nectar flowers, and many other creatures winged, hoofed and found under the sea. Some of the animals are exotic, some we see everyday. Created during extensive travel with goats from a suburb of Sarajevo in Bosnia, lar gibbons from Thailand, starfish from Norway, bison from Indiana USA, and three toed sloths found along the Amazon River in Peru to name just a few.

The series utilizes the icon of the banquet and "Last Supper" to subtly encourage viewers to consider those in the animal kingdom more humanly affording them more rights and status. To see animals humanely sometimes requires us to see them as human-like. By placing animals in a setting typically reserved for humans, it raises the question of whether we may have more in common than we admit. The feasts invite the viewers to reflect on the nature of society, our relationship and responsibility to the creatures we share the planet with.

Claire Rosen is an award-winning American artist whose elaborate large-scale photographic constructions often feature anthropomorphic animals evoking the aesthetics of classical painting. The whimsical images captivate with a fascination of the natural world while encouraging viewers to think more deeply about their relationships to these creatures.

Rosen has twice earned a place on Forbes “30 under 30” list for Art & Design and her work has received recognition from Aesthetica Art Prize, Communication Arts, IPA, Graphis, PDN, The Photoville Fence, and Px3. The work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Creative Quarterly, Der Greif, Direct Art, Fast &Co, featureShoot, The Guardian, NPR, National Geographic, PDN, Refinery29, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and The Washington Post. The work has been exhibited worldwide, from New York to Seoul, and can be found in a number of private and public collections. Rosen graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006 and Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2003.

Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York-based photographer. Her work explores the human condition through the poetics of landscape with an experimental approach to photography.

Marchand has received awards and recognitions at PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris 2020; BarTur Photography Award, 2020; the International LensCulture Art Awards 2019; GoggleWorks 2018 Juried Competition; CENTER’s Choice Awards 2015; C4FAP "Center Forward 2015"; grants from the Quebec Council of Arts and Letters; Doggone Foundation; and the San Francisco Art Institute Graduate Fellowship Award. Marchand is a MacDowell Colony and Headlands Center for the Arts Fellow. She has also attended residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Datz Museum, The Bakery Photo Collective, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and Arteles Creative Center (Finland).

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows internationally. Marchand is the author of the book of fiction, without cease the earth faintly trembles (DC Books, 2003) awarded "Critic's Pick" by NOW Magazine. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Torrie Groening is a Vancouver based artist. She studied printmaking at Emily Carr College of Art + Design and is an alumna of The Banff Centre Visual Arts department. She is a photographer who works with drawing, painting and printmaking.  Making use of new and traditional technologies Groening creates installations and photographs that reflect on a personal investment in the peripheral material of the artist’s studio. Culling from her own collections she constructs elaborate still life scenes representative of a multi-linear and often auto-fictive narrative.

Groening has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. Her work is collected by significant public institutions including Alberta College of Art & Design, Calgary, Carlton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, Vancouver Art Gallery, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, and Palm Springs Museum. Groening has held teaching positions at University of Victoria, Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Open Studio, Toronto and University of Guelph, Ontario.

Margeaux Walter received her MFA from Hunter College in 2014 and her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2006. She has received multiple honors from the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward, HeadOn Photo Festival, Photolucida, Prix de la Photographie Paris, International Photography Awards, The Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and other organizations. She has been awarded artist-in-residence programs at Montalvo Arts Center, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Marble House Project, VCCA, Red Gate Gallery in Beijing and BigCi in Bilpin, Australia (Environmental award). In 2020 she was the recipient of the Sony Alpha Female Award (2020). She has participated in dozens of exhibitions at institutions such as MOCA in Los Angeles, CA, Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ, The Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY, The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, WA, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, New York Post, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, Courrier International, and Blouin Art Info.

Kelda Van Patten creates disorienting pictorial spaces that utilize still life arrangements, collage, and re-photography to examine the ways in which the artificial world of kitsch stands in for the natural world. Her process involves layers of collage, drawing, and re-photography to form compositions where perceptions of reality and artifice are playfully shifted. Before digitalization, much of her work is done in front of a medium-format camera.

She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MAT from Lewis & Clark College, and an MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Recent exhibitions include If I had a flower for every time I think of you, Well Well Projects, Portland, OR (2024), Companians, The Vestibule, Seattle, WA (2023), and Fresh, Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2022). She is a member of Well Well Projects (Portland, OR) and the recipi­ent of multiple Regional Arts and Culture Council grants. Recent artist residencies include the Kala Institute (Berkeley, CA), Jentel (Sheridan, Wyoming), and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Otis, OR). Van Patten’s work has also been printed in several publications including Fraction Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Talking Pictures. Select projects have been commissioned by Meta Open Arts, licensed by Apple Inc., and reside in the collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.