Kevin Clay was inspired to create his painting series HOTDOG! by Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest two years ago. He immersed himself in online videos of competitive eating during the total lunar eclipse in January 2019.
“I had the idea to create a series of paintings around Joey Chestnut’s record of 74 Nathan’s hotdogs in 10 minutes,” he said in a statement. “One hotdog per painting.”
When Clay started, he said his goal was to paint through Chestnut’s record. He finished 21 of the 74 paintings. However, the project had to be put on hold to renovate the studio, The Mont, where he works on Orleans Street. In March 2020, Clay said he was asked to finish the hot dog series for an exhibition at the Art Studio scheduled for July of that year.
“Happily, I obliged,” he said. “The distance from when I had last worked on the project until then had given me enough time to find a renewed interest in the project and momentum that I had lost before.”
The COVID-19 quarantine gave him more time to work on the series, especially with the show being delayed, Clay said.
“I knew that I could push the series further,” he said. “Since time had passed and my work had somewhat switched directions, I had the opportunity to start with a fresh approach.”
Clay switched from oil painting to acrylic gouache and started a brand-new series of 74 paintings. In July 2020, hot dog eating champion Joey Chestnut broke his own record, eating a total of 75 hotdogs, which added one more painting to Clay’s series.
“As the show was pushed back into 2021, and I was given the time to continue working on it, I decided that I would paint a second series of 75,” Clay said. “The final result is 164 total works, all focusing on the American classic, the Nathan’s hot dog.”
Rather than focusing on the individual hotdogs in each panel, Clay’s work transitioned to exploring hot dogs in groupings.
This approach “creat[ed] claustrophobic masses of meat and bun on a singular panel, their form edging between figurative and abstract, an idea that I would continue to pursue through the rest of the project,” he said.
“The show became less about setting a distinct parameter and following it until the end,” he said. The focus shifted to “allowing myself to push and flex the parameters I had set for myself, both back in 2019 and with the new series in 2020.”
The coronavirus pandemic’s impact across the planet trickled into Clay’s work.
“The grouped paintings, done in landscape format, call to the idea of crowds, largely painted at a time when the concept of a crowd was not only impossible, but dangerous,” he said. “I’ve come to think of the work I did for HOTDOG! in 2020 was somewhat reflective of COVID.”
“Typically, the Nathan’s Hotdog Eating Contest is something of a grotesque but beautiful mirror to a traditional sport event,” Clay said. “A large crowd gathers to watch someone push themselves to the limit in a particular game.
“In this case, the game is consuming as much of a type of food as you can in a very small amount of time,” he said. “The competitors train, build hype, brag, boast and experience much of the same tenets as you would see with a professional basketball player.
“Joey Chestnut has sponsorships and even his own line of condiments. His mouth, stomach and ability to eat are unparalleled in the world of competitive eating, and he gloats about it.”
Some might not be aware that there is a major league of eating, Clay said. The women’s world record holder for eating in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest is Miki Sudo with 48.5. Although she eats considerably less than Joey, she is a champion in her own right, and Joey and Miki are the face of the major league of eating, he said.
“Instead of focusing on the competitors themselves in the paintings, I wanted the hotdogs to be given a chance to be seen and acknowledged,” Clay said. “What I mean by this is not so much a statement on the industry behind hotdogs and the environment, but more of a statement on the ways that the things we consume often become an afterthought to the way we consume them.”
“We will gladly glorify the consumption without thinking about things beyond it or what we are consuming.”
The iconography of the hotdog is associated with a classic American ideal, Clay said.
“By painting this form, the bun and the hotdog inside, over and over again, I’ve touched on what it means to break down an icon to its pure form and reduce it to a near abstraction,” he said. “America culturally ties the hotdog to what it means to be American–to have a cheap, hard-to-pinpoint and easy-to-manipulate consumable.”
“It’s no mistake that it would be so deeply ingrained with the Fourth of July, or that we would have a yearly event where more than 30,000 people gather to watch someone eat 75 of them in 10 minutes, and not just watch, but enthusiastically cheer and hail it as an impressive feat.”
HOTDOG! Will be on display in The Art Studio’s Pop-Up Gallery from July 1 through July 31. Entry to the opening reception on July 1 is free and open to the public as of First Thursday. Refreshments will be provided.