Events
Do It Yourself / Hang In There, Baby book release party, November 13
Join photographer Trina Fernandez and Birchwood Palace Industries for a release party for Trina's new photo book, Do It Yourself / Hang In There, Baby. Trina will read from the book, interview her mother in California via Zoom, and serve some of the dishes featured in the book, including SkyFlakes crackers. Copies of the book will be available for sale, along with a poster and free 1" buttons.
About Do It Yourself / Hang in There, Baby
Cleaning out her mother's house, Trina found a collaged cookbook of her mother's from the early 1980s, collecting recipes and what she calls "a blueprint for the start of her family." In Do It Yourself, using that cookbook as a starting place, Trina reassembles the improvised meals of her own adulthood, and art directs them with the same eye-watering sense of excess that one finds in the Good Housekeeping cookbooks of the late '70s. The recipes' instructions reflect the struggles and heartbreak in her own life, contrasting them with those of her mother's thirty years earlier. Both experiences are tied together with oversaturated photographic tableaus of middle-class abundance and good taste. The result is an examination of memory, loneliness, depression and family that is both very funny and deeply affecting.
About Trina Fernandez
Trina is a photographic installation artist, speaking to the human experiences we don't often talk about. With the use of popular imagery, nostalgia, and artifice, Trina recreates scenes to process her past as a way to connect to the present, creating a model of emotion for those who may still be searching for permission to feel. Truth, honesty, and vulnerability are central to the work as she concerns herself with our collective desire to have a deeper connection to one another. She is a self described "intellectual bimbo."
About Birchwood Palace Industries
Birchwood Palace Industries, L.L.C. is a publisher of artist books, zines and other small-run printed novelties. It is a project of writer and artist Andy Sturdevant, and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.