A Review of ICANDY at The Melrose Botanical Gardens: Eat Your Darlings :P

"In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." 

As cannibalism re-enters the public imagination, there is a growing conversation about consumption. Whether it serves as a critique of capitalism, diet culture, or an investigation into celebrity and its perils, the discourse is broad, multifaceted, and centered on one thing: control.  

Melrose Botanical Garden centers on Los Angeles icon Angelyne, inadvertently critiquing the same structure she has vied for in her pursuit of celebrity. Angelyne, in all her glory, her femininity, and the idolization of her body, serves as a point of entry and confusion for decades of Angelenos as they grapple with and grope at the argument that Angelyne embodies a self-appointed and maintained image of an icon.  

The exhibition features food-made portraits of cultural icons, reduced to their most memorable faces—composed of peas, mashed potatoes, and other edibles. The plates are converted to frames and exist as everlasting signatures of what was before being consumed or thrown away. I cannot help but imagine Angelyne slowly devouring each face. I wonder if the process is slow and transubstantial or equivalent to the binge mania of Cronus devouring his son. This play between devotion, diction, and degradation draws out the personal power of celebrity and its distilled internalization in all of our self-identifying and self-aggrandizing natures. Angelyne takes the form of appointer, follower, and executioner—in a way we can all relate to if we are being honest and forthright in our power to decide who, what, and when someone or something earns our attention.  

Another reading of the work I’d like to offer is the control of it all. We do not see the images decompose or come into being, nor the violence of consumption. We are only privy to the collection of disparate parts made into an image—the recognizable—much like how femininity, youth, and social capital are commonly prescribed. This, for me, speaks to the control Angelyne is once again self-appointing. She eats the images like time eats the icons. We don’t see the death march into obscurity, only the nurturing traces of beauty.  

In a way, I wonder if, by consuming, this is how Angelyne regains control of herself and her image—becoming, in the process, cemented permanently in the realm of icons and importance. I also wonder: is this visualization of our diets, our trends, our surgeries, our ways of controlling how we are seen to control if we are accepted?