Eat Me Daimen




Eat Me Damien, 2011
Influenced as well by Ginger Rogers and Fried Astaire, what he did, she did but backwards and in heels.
“Eat Me Damien” is a piece that directs a cutting edge of sarcasm toward another famous piece. In 1991 Damien Hirst put a dead shark in a fish tank filled with formaldehyde and called the work “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” The work was sold in 2004 to a collector for a reported 8 to 12 million dollars. It is rumored that the shark is often replaced when the work is shown in different venues.
There is an innate machismo embedded in various interpretations of this work, such as that the Shark represents a predatory tactic employed in business, or that the shark represents a similar tactic often unleashed in the art world. That male centric and predatory point of view is replaced by a highly personal, humorous and indeed irreplaceable feature in “Eat Me Damien”. I challenge the embodiment of power and playing with the meaning of consumption – who is consuming whom?
I placed a formaldehyde protected piece of my own body, her testicles, detached during a gender clarification surgery, into a fish tank, by which she also speaks of the objectness of sex as well as embodiment of gender.
“This is part of my body. But I like them best out there. “ installation shot from ‘have we met before?’