Sheryl Anaya’s ceramics and video performances make a game of their formal referents: Absurd Appetites (Tables for Two) casts everyday objects—spoons, forks, knives, plates, tablecloths—to both reflect and twist viewer’s expectations. À la Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-9), Anaya utilizes familiar objects as a substrate to investigate the lived environment of gendered labor and women’s historical invisibility. While Chicago exhibited individualized vulvas, giving women a “seat at the table,” Anaya inserts Minne di Sant’Agata—Sicilian for Saint Agatha’s breasts—a breast-shaped pastry that pays homage to the stomata of Catholic martyr Saint Agatha. After rejecting the Roman governor Quintianus, Agatha had her breasts forcefully removed leading to her eventual death. In Absurd Appetites (Tables for Two), the story of Saint Agatha epitomizes the social consumption of women’s bodies and compulsory heterosexuality.

In Anaya’s newest solo exhibition, absurd humor and historical reference probe ingrained social routines. Video performances projected onto small table settings reveal the absurdity behind acts such as preparing a sandwich and playing with our food. The repurposing of men’s button-down shirts as tablecloths and napkins reverses the association of femininity with domestic labor: Anaya suggests a way forward beyond viewing labor through a gender binary. In its newest arrangement, Absurd Appetites (Tables for Two) explores the intimacy of queer relationships, trading the banquet-style in its earlier iteration for bistro-style tables for couples. Through a thoughtful engagement with the body and food, Anaya’s installation retools cultural objects into spaces for communal reflection.