When did you start putting these things together?
It was a long process. I think a lot of artists have this personal evolution. When I was in grad school a lot of my work was abstract and inspired by universal aspects of being human. They referenced human anatomy. Slowly I turned my world inside out.
Then I won a grant to expose the cliché, “you are what you eat” and I started doing a lot of research and hanging out in grocery stores. I kept finding myself in the produce section and realizing, “wait a minute, it’s the middle of winter in Buffalo, New York, and it’s like springtime here.” It was fascinating to realize the produce section exists without seasons. I became very curious and soon found out all sorts of interesting things about the industrialized food complex and began making a lot of paintings that responded to the failures of it.