Hugh Hayden's exhibition 'American Food' available to preview in Virtual Reality

Hayden's first UK solo exhibition is also the first to directly engage with Hayden’s culinary installation practice, bringing together wooden picnic tables, cast-iron skillets, and a multimedia stove to reflect on the history and significance of cooking and dining together in America.

The exhibition features a variety of new and recent works, including 26 ‘skillets’, recast from a unique pairing of a wooden West African-style mask and a found cast iron frying pan. The function and form of both the skillets as early African cookware and the masks’ ancestral and ceremonial origins are merged in a technique called sand-casting; Hayden adopts this rudimentary means of manufacture to celebrate the imperfectness of the materials, their colonial histories, and the inherent loss of detail in the reproduction process. Hayden likens the abstraction of the original objects that occurs in the sand-casting process as a form of diaspora that transforms the skillets into something layered and culturally syncretic. The artist also holds this mirror up to his own identity as an African American: an abstraction on the African antecedent.

All of Lisson's current exhibitions in London and New York can be experienced in 360 VR via GalleriesNow.

Cover image: Hugh Hayden, Communion (2019), Chestnut with steel hardware, 405 x 1050 x 620 cm, 159 3/8 x 413 3/8 x 244 in