For the past five years, sausages, hot dogs, and processed meats have appeared throughout Lauren Cohen’s drawings as recurring motifs that operate simultaneously as cultural shorthand and symbolic form. In The Hot Dog Party, these images become a framework for examining American rituals of gathering, consumption, and desire. The project developed during an extended winter stay in her hometown in 2023–24, when family celebrations, a televised football game, and the textures of domestic life converged into a body of work attentive to masculinity, sexuality, and social performance.

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Through the repetition of mass-produced food objects, Cohen investigates how everyday commodities accrue emotional and psychological weight. The hot dog functions as both an absurd and loaded signifier, gesturing toward humor and excess while also pointing to gendered fantasy, intimacy, and the contradictions embedded within American identity. The Hot Dog Party situates the familiar within a charged symbolic field, using satire and material specificity to explore how cultural rituals shape personal and collective experience.