Food for Thought
Aimée Crystina Reed || [ CURATORIAL STATEMENT ] use compass to view walls
Curatorial statement
Food has forever been correlated with art, whether as muse, subject matter or symbolic tool and has itself been raised to an art form not only here in the Bay Area, but around the world. The very essence of food has evolved past a daily necessity for survival to a symbol of wealth and creativity. FOOD FOR THOUGHT is a look at three young artists, Crystal Liu, Tim Sullivan and Takako Tanabe, who are using either the subjectivity or the objectivity of food as a deeper look into the various aspects of our daily lives.
Crystal Liu's drawings from her series "My House is Dead...it's my birthday," series are both whimsical and ominous at the same time. Using ink and marker on paper, Liu creates what appears at first to be beautiful depictions of birthday cakes. It's upon closer inspection that the viewer begins to realize that the cakes have an element of decay to them. In "...broken cake," the tiers are falling into each other and the juice of the fruit appears to be running onto the cake indicating that it has been there for a while. In both "...lime cake" and "...sky cake," the sides of the cakes are declining, causing the once beautiful cakes to sag, unable to hide their corrosion any longer. However, Liu doesn't abandon her sense of hope, as the cakes begin to take on new abstracted shapes that allow them to have life after their inevitable demise. Is Liu using these birthday cakes as symbols of us? This could be a too literal reading into her work, something that Liu appears not to desire from her audience.
Tim Sullivan's photographs, LUNCH and TRIX are tongue-in-cheek takes on the idea of the still-life. In LUNCH, Sullivan gives color to the tomato soup, but what looks the most nourishing in the photograph is the copy of "Nausea" by Jean-Paul Sartre. Here, Sullivan seems to be referencing the relationship of food (or lack thereof) and the starving artist, with a slight hint of a question of authenticity, resulting in a slight nod to the poor artist or intellect. In TRIX, Sullivan assembles what upon first glance could be an advertisement for the namesake cereal. Yet by making the photograph predominately black and white, with just a hint of color being allowed to come through the bowl of cereal, Sullivan takes away the joy that is usually marketed by the cereal's maker. For a struggling artist eating yet again another bowl of cereal, it isn't a rainbow of fruit flavors, as much as yet another reminder that the fight to survive artistically continues.
Takako Tanabe's plaster sculptures series, "the milk crown make the world," takes the object of food to the next level by giving it a 3-dimensional aspect. Tanabe's milk crown sculptures are both abstract and action-oriented at the same time, in her focus on capturing the residual splash that occurs after a drop of milk. Tanabe intentionally places these sculptures into ordinary environments hoping to set an empirical test for audiences to see if they and art can co-exist. By doing this, Tanabe hopes to create small, subtle revolutions in people's lives, believing that these tiny changes could make the world complete.
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Food has forever been correlated with art, whether as muse, subject matter or symbolic tool and has itself been raised to an art form not only here in the Bay Area, but around the world. The very essence of food has evolved past a daily necessity for survival to a symbol of wealth and creativity. FOOD FOR THOUGHT is a look at three young artists, Crystal Liu, Tim Sullivan and Takako Tanabe, who are using either the subjectivity or the objectivity of food as a deeper look into the various aspects of our daily lives.
Crystal Liu's drawings from her series "My House is Dead...it's my birthday," series are both whimsical and ominous at the same time. Using ink and marker on paper, Liu creates what appears at first to be beautiful depictions of birthday cakes. It's upon closer inspection that the viewer begins to realize that the cakes have an element of decay to them. In "...broken cake," the tiers are falling into each other and the juice of the fruit appears to be running onto the cake indicating that it has been there for a while. In both "...lime cake" and "...sky cake," the sides of the cakes are declining, causing the once beautiful cakes to sag, unable to hide their corrosion any longer. However, Liu doesn't abandon her sense of hope, as the cakes begin to take on new abstracted shapes that allow them to have life after their inevitable demise. Is Liu using these birthday cakes as symbols of us? This could be a too literal reading into her work, something that Liu appears not to desire from her audience.
Tim Sullivan's photographs, LUNCH and TRIX are tongue-in-cheek takes on the idea of the still-life. In LUNCH, Sullivan gives color to the tomato soup, but what looks the most nourishing in the photograph is the copy of "Nausea" by Jean-Paul Sartre. Here, Sullivan seems to be referencing the relationship of food (or lack thereof) and the starving artist, with a slight hint of a question of authenticity, resulting in a slight nod to the poor artist or intellect. In TRIX, Sullivan assembles what upon first glance could be an advertisement for the namesake cereal. Yet by making the photograph predominately black and white, with just a hint of color being allowed to come through the bowl of cereal, Sullivan takes away the joy that is usually marketed by the cereal's maker. For a struggling artist eating yet again another bowl of cereal, it isn't a rainbow of fruit flavors, as much as yet another reminder that the fight to survive artistically continues.
Takako Tanabe's plaster sculptures series, "the milk crown make the world," takes the object of food to the next level by giving it a 3-dimensional aspect. Tanabe's milk crown sculptures are both abstract and action-oriented at the same time, in her focus on capturing the residual splash that occurs after a drop of milk. Tanabe intentionally places these sculptures into ordinary environments hoping to set an empirical test for audiences to see if they and art can co-exist. By doing this, Tanabe hopes to create small, subtle revolutions in people's lives, believing that these tiny changes could make the world complete.
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