Wonder Bread (2025)

Dream Farm Commons

I asked Ann if she wanted anything from the installation to install in the main space, and she immediately said the Wonder Bread. I asked if she wanted anything else. No, just the Wonder Bread. I can see her point. This Wonder Bread was hard to come by. I had to go to a few stores because they were all sold out. I wouldn’t settle. I refused to Wonder Bagel or Wonder English Muffin. It had to be the bread incarnate. After a month, it has still not gone bad. If all artists’ want is to be immortal (Milan Kundera), then Wonder Bread is truly the great artist of our time. 

Is what I am doing embodied appropriation art, and, in that case, is Wonder Bread a pre-embodiment (sitting on a pedestal, begging to be eaten)? Every bread is a suggestion. But this bread also has a body: steamy, sliced, and slumped. 

When people asked me about the show, I would say it is a box with eye holes cut out called Seeing Outside the Box. Sometimes, people would laugh to the point of tears, and other times, I would get blank stares. I realized that my art exists in a space between losing it and not losing it. When I started dating Adam, he told me that humor is the least praised of emotions. We never see an Academy Award for a funny movie. We expect to see melodrama for something to be worthy. Something needs to win against the odds (usually, when people win, they also mention the odds). When we appraise art, we come in loaded with expectations of what the category is. Can we ask this of Wonder Bread? Is it doing it for us? Yes. Yes, we can. Steamy, sliced, and slumped. 

“the force of attachment has more righteousness than anything intelligibly or objectively “true”: she enables the refusal of cramped necessity by way of a poetics of misrecognition.” — Lauren Berlant