Derek Steele is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges photography, sculpture, and cultural inquiry. Raised in Metro-Detroit on a healthy dose of the Beatles and Motown, he explored wind instruments and global sounds, from the pulse of African drums to the steel drums of Trinidad and the bossa nova guitar of João Gilberto.
During university studies in psychology, he discovered the quiet stillness of the darkroom, a revelation that would anchor his visual practice. Steele draws equal inspiration from the spare prose of Hemingway, the restless curiosity of Anthony Bourdain, and the radical precision of chefs René Redzepi (Noma, Copenhagen) and Grant Achatz (Alinea, Chicago).
Over the past fifteen years, Steele has explored food cultures, from street-side grills and packaged goods to vineyard soils and oyster beds, capturing the narratives embedded in every plate and wrapper. This immersion revealed a quiet tension: the rising demand for farm-to-table transparency alongside an explosion of processed convenience.
Portraits of Consumption emerges from that paradox. Life-size sculptural heads are meticulously constructed from raw, elemental ingredients and their hyper-engineered counterparts. Presented as diptychs or triptychs, each pairing invites contemplation rather than judgment. What do we choose to ingest, and what does that choice sculpt within us? The work honors the grace of unadorned nature while acknowledging the seductive craft of industrial design, two valid expressions of human ingenuity.
Printed at archival scale on museum-grade substrates, the photographs transcend documentation to become objects of quiet provocation. Steele’s fine-art editions position the viewer as both diner and archaeologist, sifting the edible strata of contemporary life (ongoing series).
