You Art What You Eat, at MASS MoCA
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Gummi bears, Cheetoes, and JELL-O, but also corn, beets, and peaches, Kidspace's largest group show to date, You Art What You Eat, promises to have visitor's mouths watering as five artists whose primary art material is food take over the recently expanded second floor Kidspace gallery at MASS MoCA.Featuring Chandra Bocci, Luisa Caldwell, Saxton Freymann, Liz Hickok, and Joan Steiner, all artists who capitalize on specific properties of food and its sensory appeal, the exhibition will include sculptures, dioramas, photographs, videos, paintings, and site specific-installations. You Art What You Eat runs October 3, 2009 through February 28, 2010.
Chandra Bocci from Portland, Oregon, will create a 15 foot-wide installation of the Big Bang, an explosion of candy Gummi bears, worms, and fish that is lit from the center. The piece expresses the sticky nature of the Big Bang theory and at the same time, comments on consumerism. She will also create a Cheetoes and Fruit Loops installation in the windows of the gallery. Bocci builds large-scale installations that explore notions of fantasy, spectacle, and consumer culture.
For his children's book series Saxton Freymann from New York City carves fruits and vegetables to create people and animals. In the series he transforms garden-variety produce into emotive faces and amusing animals enhanced with peppercorn eyes, beet-juice mouths, or corn-kernel teeth. "The colors and forms are so wonderful that they give you everything you need. The characters come out of the vegetable or fruit. I'm just nudging it to something it resembles," explains Freymann a graduate of Williams College, who is the creator How Are You Peeling?; Foods with Moods and Dog Food (both named New York Times Best Illustrated Book); Food for Thought, and Food Play.
Liz Hickok from San Francisco, California is renowned for her views of buildings, particularly San Francisco landmarks, created out of JELL-O. Hickok states, "The gelatinous material evokes uncanny parallels with the geological uncertainties of San Francisco's landscape. While the translucent beauty of the compositions first seduces the viewer, their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts." The exhibition will include 5 photographs of varying sizes, an actual JELL-O mold, and an amusing video of Jarvis Rockwell's Godzilla destroying JELL-O San Francisco.
Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Luisa Caldwell has found something productive to do with those maddening little labels found on fruits and vegetables. She uses them to form flowers petals and as a base for other collage paintings. The exhibition will show her progression with the labels from simply using them to document her eating habits over a month to the formation of ever more elaborate flower paintings. The exhibit will include a sample of four years of fruit label explorations, as well as two paintings. Caldwell will also display an installation made of candy wrappers. Both choices of materials-labels and candy wrappers-encourage visitors to consider the marketing and classification of food.
Joan Steiner from nearby Claverack, New York, uses a variety of found objects to make intricate dioramas for her renowned Look-Alikes children's book series. Publishers Weekly says: "In this world ... nothing is quite what it seems, slices of bread pave a sidewalk; infant pacifiers double as gaslights; pretzels affixed to round crackers become chairs at an old-fashioned soda fountain" The exhibition will feature four dioramas of cityscapes where a large percentage of the pieces are comprised of food. A photograph used in her books and a video showing how she creates her dioramas will also be in the exhibit. A self-taught artist Steiner holds a degree in philosophy from Barnard College, and creates her work in her home studio.
The exhibition will also include an interactive area entitled "Food for Thought", where visitors can learn more about food consumption, a listening station to hear over 150 food songs, and a reading area with food-related children's books. Kidspace will offer opportunities for the public to create their own sculptures using food during public hours Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 4pm, plus during school holidays.
Kidspace has an extensive program planned for the school groups in the North Adams Public Schools and North Berkshire School Union. Funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Schools grants, students will work with four artists (Luisa Caldwell, Liz Hickok, Chandra Bocci, and Saxton Freymann) in school residency programs. They will visit the gallery with Kidspace staff and education interns to view the work and create their own prints and sculptures using food as the basis.
An interdisciplinary curriculum guide will be presented to the participating teachers and made available on Kidspace's website, massmoca.org/kidspace. North Adams Regional Hospital's REACH program will work with North Adams' second graders on nutrition and will make connections to You Art What You Eat.
You Art What You Eat will open to the public on Saturday, October 3, 2009 from 11am to 4pm. The artists will be on hand to meet and greet the public. At 12pm, meet Liz Hickok who will demonstrate how she makes JELL-O sculptures. At 1pm, meet Chandra Bocci who will help visitors make tasty sculptures out of Froot Loops. At 2pm, meet Luisa Caldwell to talk about candy wrappers and fruit labels as art materials. Books will be available for purchase and signing by Saxton Freymann and Joan Steiner from 11am to 1pm. Many fun food art-making activities will be held throughout the day including pumpkin carving and vegetable car workshops.
Kidspace is a collaborative project of the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and MASS MoCA. Major support for You Art What You Eat is provided by the Avis Family Foundation, with additional support from Berkshire Bank; the Brownrigg Charitable Trust and Alice Shaver Foundation in memory of Lynn Laitman; the Golub Foundation; the James and Robert Hardman Fund for North Adams, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the National Endowment for the Arts; and the Ruth E. Proud Charitable Trust.
