2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageTablescapes: Veritas and Vanitas
Marcella Hackbardt
Friday, October 10 - 10:00AM to 10:35AM
College for Creative Studies
The history of photography abounds with images of tables set for real and imagined guests, communicating both shared and personal experiences of home, labor, and possessions. Tablescapes: Veritas and Vanitas examines contemporary and historical photographers that have imaged and reimagined the dining table and dinnerware as a vector of complex emotions, labor, and gendered experience, as well as a site of resistance to and re-imaginings of the social order. Their images, from Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series, to Leonard Suryajaya's use of the dining table for multi-cultural rituals, and David Bate's political critiques in The Broken Society, elicit the opportunity to rethink issues such as nourishment, community, domestic labor, intimacy, and fragile beauty, while embracing/questioning personal proclivities and social practices, in a thoroughly photographic means of presentation and re-presentation.
speaker
Marcella Hackbardt
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