Hello!
Victoria Jensen (she/her) is a mixed media artist from New Jersey and currently lives in Chesapeake, Virginia. She is currently earning an MFA degree in Visual Studies from Norfolk State University.
Her current art practice consists of using both traditional media and digital programs to make sense of her hyphenated gastronomy as a woman of Dominican and European heritage. To create her art, she uses a variety of media ranging from digital programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, to tablecloths, markers, acrylic paint, and assorted paper collage. Her stylistic approach is a combination of realism and stylistic mark-making. She uses graphic linework to emphasize certain elements or emotions in the realistically depicted figures and food, such as the wrinkles in a grieving grandmother’s face or the thick swirling broth of sancocho. Each piece uses food to explore relationships and celebrates tradition and culture in the hopes of connecting to the audience and prompting reflection on their own lives.
Claude Fischler presents us with a question, “if we do not know what we eat, then how can we know what we are?” The kitchen and the kitchen table are where narratives are passed on from generation to generation. Food helps us digest our narrative inheritance and develop our identity, both within our family unit and as independent people. In his paper, Food, Self, and Identity, Fischler writes that “food is central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically, and socially by the foods he/she chooses to incorporate.”
Have any questions? Let’s chat!
Email: victoria.artderoja@gmail.com
Instagram: @art_de_roja