John Motley reviews the exhibition Gina Beavers: Family Style at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon, on view through August 25, 2013.

Motley writes: "Beavers' detailed painting coupled with her materials imbues her subjects with a perverse artifice that recasts the appetizing as repulsive. Rather than the age-old still life — a wine bottle and a collection of precisely rendered apples and pears — Beavers' paintings of food put me in mind of Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's 1962 sculpture 'Glass Case With Pies,' a menagerie of sloppily assembled desserts, all about as mouth-watering as wax fruit. The best quality of Beavers' paintings is the disjunction between the flat application of paint and the depth of the sculpted surface. In 'Memphis BBQ (Looks Like a Gina Beavers),' 2013, a school bus yellow corncob is nestled in tinfoil. Study it and you'll see how difficult it becomes to tell the depth of the painted tinfoil from the actual depth of pumice and porcelain."