With his series ‘Wotsit all about?’ artist James Ostrer visualises the results of a corrupted globalisation and increasingly dangerous methods of food production. He applies sweets and foodstuffs to a human subject, often himself to show how we are being destroyed by mass production, encouraging us to question the decisions that are made for us: Wotsit all about?
Speaking largely on the twentieth and twenty first centuries’ dietary concerns and sugar’s uncomfortable place within this, Ostrer’s photographs conjure metaphorical allegories as Ketchup flows as tears down frosted cheeks and Kit Kats’ mouths bark back with menacing grimaces. The resulting photographs form a bizarre pattern of tribalism and cartoon-like absurdity. They become a catalogue of self- destructive behaviours, a re-packaged eye candy for uncomfortable consumption. They are bittersweet to the point of decay and emphasise much of our contemporary society’s needs for synthetic glucose praise, and, in doing so, proselytise the image as a new catalogue of self-harming sugar worship.