EAT ME, DRINK ME, an installation
November, 2022
EAT ME, DRINK ME, an installation, is on view as part of the invitational show ADAPTATIONS: LAND at The Drawing Room Annex, SF beginning October 1, 2022. This installation explores the sensorial and conflicting experience of today’s food consumption and waste, at once seductive and repulsive. Sequential, rhythmic photography allows me to combine painterly elements with a sculptural format. Each one of the works in this installation invites the viewer to reflect on the visual beauty and subliminal seductiveness of the foods we consume – even of the trash we collect. I find a striking graphic similarity between the rhythmic patterns of this imagery and that of the representations of many of our physiological systems.
MAD MEAT (1999) - 5 continuous photographic strips, laminated and mounted on white canvas, 96” x 30”. I created this work at a time when "Mad cow" disease (an infectious disease caused by prions that affect the brains of cattle) was very much in the news. If humans eat diseased tissue from cattle, they may develop the human form of mad cow disease known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The horror of this fatal illness hides behind the graphic elegance of the marbled meat from a local butcher shop.
FISH (2001) - 5 continuous photographic strips, laminated and mounted on white canvas, 144” x 30”. I am both attracted and repulsed by the shiny, patterned color and graphic quality of fish from a local open air market.
AVOCADO CACTUS (2001) - 5 continuous photographic strips, laminated and mounted on white canvas, 144” x 30”. Equally attracted and repulsed by the contradictory textures of the avocado fruit and the cactus plant, I love the graphic quality that emerges when the two are juxtaposed.
TRASH (2012) is the focus of the installation, an ode to packaging waste in all its hyper-real glory. The wall hanging is centered on the back wall, representing the end-game of a hot summer weekend of busy consumption in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
Mixed media, sequential digital photographic print on hanging canvas, 78” x 59”.
On a hot summer weekend I went “fishing” for street garbage with my camera. I then recomposed these images - my own form of recycling - as an attempt to reveal the underlying beauty of rejected objects, the horrifying virtuosity of a cascade of shiny materials and colors.
Mixed media, sequential digital photographic print on hanging canvas, 78” x 59”.
On a hot summer weekend I went “fishing” for street garbage with my camera. I then recomposed these images - my own form of recycling - as an attempt to reveal the underlying beauty of rejected objects, the horrifying virtuosity of a cascade of shiny materials and colors.
TERRA (2004) - traditional, sequential photography, 9 continuous photographic strips, laminated and mounted on black canvas, 54” x 64”. This work is a homage to my father and to the land where he grew up in north-eastern Italy’s Romagna region. The varying conditions of the earth from barren to fertile reflect one of the principle preoccupations of local farmers.
Giving an artist talk... November 1, 2022
see also
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