Bret Lyon Sculpture

Food is universally recognized as the means by which we sustain life. Sweets and treats are often an addition to the meals we eat. They have increased in our lives exponentially since their advent. It has reached the point that most people are indulging several times a day. The connection between the pace in which our culture ingests sweets to the consumption of material goods is in close proximity to one another. Ironically, both are intertwined in threatening our ability to sustain life.

In my current body of work, I utilize sweets and treats to symbolize the disturbing trend toward extreme excesses, self-reward, and what has been called the Mc Donaldization of society. The quantity of food and “super-sizing” of this work reflects the abundance to which we have become accustomed while also invoking a sense of waste. Realizing that the work is a consumed good, there is a connection between the ephemeral quality of my food based work and the quality of consumer goods. Most products are expected to become outdated, replaced, or to last around five years. It is no coincidence that the shelf life of my food based work parallels this. We are increasingly becoming a throw-away society and, worse yet, we are being forced to be. My work expresses the societal obsession with “super-sizing” as an effort to satiate our personal hungers by overindulging our material appetites.