Most Important Meal of the Day

20% OFF SALE!
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***$160 >>>>> SALE PRICE***
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“Most Important Meal of the Day”  J.M.Liles © 2025
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Acrylic on canvas (10x20)
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Original art by  Minneapolis local, queer, non-binary artist.
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Ship in U.S. ONLY
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Framed. 
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A bright bowl of cereal, splashed with milk, sits as a symbol of childhood routine and domestic stability. Cheerful colors and familiar shapes promise energy, comfort, and nourishment — the packaged ideal of “the most important meal of the day.” Yet the sweetness is empty. What pretends at care delivers little more than sugar.

Across from it, a glass pipe rests as a stark counterpoint. Placed in dialogue, the objects collapse the distance between ritual and dependence, between childhood habit and adult addiction. Both soothe temporarily, both mask need with chemical satisfaction, and neither sustains.

The irony extends beyond metaphor. In the United States, narcotics were first introduced under the guise of medicine: cocaine in toothache drops, heroin in cough syrups, amphetamines for “pep.” These substances, once sold as cures, became the very street drugs later condemned. The cereal bowl and the pipe together reveal this continuum — a cycle of false sustenance and institutional complicity, where addiction and nourishment are separated not by substance but by profit.
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