Family Dinner is on Sunday
Family Diner is on Sunday (2016)
Media Arts Installation
Marion Nicoll Gallery, Calgary, Alberta
As children develop into adults, and subsequently into their elder years, their definitions of family, and their relationships within the family, change. Nowhere are these transitions made more visible than in the microenvironment of the family dinner, a ritual which can connect us with our loved ones, or can explode into a minefield.
The ritual of social eating is universal. Family dinner traditions are established through the child’s earliest experiences with the pleasure of food, and the constraints of socializing to the expectations of the family. As the child develops, such rituals (and the emotional baggage which accompanies them) are perpetuated as voices within the psyche until they are challenged, broken, or renegotiated when the child transitions into adulthood. Later still, the young, and even aging, adult returns to the nuclear family dinner, with all the joys, frustrations and resentments this implies, while establishing new routines with his or her own children. Ultimately, as the individual faces old age and the practice of communal eating declines, more and more people are faced with the question: with whom do we sit and socialize around the table?