Last Supper 2010 – Call for Food Art
Last Supper 2010 Curatorial Theme: “Self-Made” by Coralina Meyer
The Last Supper Salon 2010 will explore the creative individual as a self-made person and provocateur of social change. In contrast to the male robber baron of our industrial age, the contemporary version of the ‘self-made man’ is an artist of any gender, discipline; someone who is cross-cultural and cross-national, and someone tapped in to the individual as part of the border-less, collective wisdom created by open source ideas sharing. Humanity is transforming it’s identity to fit the current needs of a new economy, and socio-political environment. Using an experimental, multi-sensory, collaborative approach, we hope to critique the way we produce the goods and services that define our generation, the way we consume media, products and our environment, and the way open dialog, DIY and technology promotes self-made identity prototypes.
Food Art Curators’ Statement by Nadia Siddiqui & Michelle Zatta
“. . . who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom/who plunged themselves under the meat truck looking for an egg . . .” –Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
The times . . . they have never been easy. This is particularly true for the self-made individual—striking out on one’s own in 1920, in 1957, in 2010 for a greater purpose than oneself is bone-tiring. We do it because the prospect of staying still is more dire than the prospect of failing. Weary minds, hearts, bones need nourishment and at a most basic level sometimes the self-made needs the home-made: meatloaf, apple pie, curry, moussaka, food. Home may be far away, but the self-made individual can improvise—plunging under the meat truck to find an egg, as it were. This year’s Last Supper Festival food art exhibit is a celebration of improvised comfort food. We are searching for representations of food art that help ease the burden and nourish the soul and are created with whatever ingredients and space are at hand: the self-made gotta eat too.
Submission Information: Online Submissions Due 7/23/2010
Please include in e-mail: Artist Name, Title, Size, Ingredients, Installation Equipment/Needs, Instructions, Availability to attend opening, Short Bio, Interpretation (How work relates to theme of show), jpg Headshot (2″x3″ 300dpi), jpg of Food Art (300 dpi), Link to Food Artist’s website, Permissions to show in Festival and Press/Print Materials
e-mail Nadia or Michelle: Food@Lambastic.com
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – biG CAAKe
Food Artist: biG CAAKe (Gary Lincoff, Christopher Kennedy, Athena Kokoronis, Caroline A Woolard, Kate Cahill, and others)
Title: StrataSpore Layered Cake
Interpretation: When the largest and oldest living organism known surfaces, it manifests as a delicate mushroom no bigger than the palm of a hand. Inspired by rhizome networks as tools for bioremediation, a metaphor for the layers of unseen infrastructure below our feet, and a collaborative niche upon which to focus a collective narrative, we propose a multifaceted interactive research project that will culminate in events combining dance, education, environmental remediation and architecture. StrataSpore is a platform for collective knowledge about local NYC ecosystems and its potential for applications in urban sustainability. The platform will cultivate “spores” of knowledge by combining elements of task/performance-based art, experiential learning, and experimental design practice that implements a dialogue about unseen, natural, and man-made systems as sites for restorative sustainability applications. Our focus is directed towards the mushroom, and its potential for changing the ecology within a landscape. We invite communities and individuals to partake (with biG CAAKe) in a cross-disciplinary practice of visualization and re-interpretation of natural systems (mycology) as models for community engagement. Based on the connective function and form of mushroom ecology, StrataSpore will harness local fungi as a model and means for engagement and re-interpretation of living in urban spaces.
Bio: biG CAAKe is a cross-disciplinary collective that studies mycology as part of their practice. biG CAAKe was awarded an ILAND Research Fellowship, and are presently collaborating and studying with Mycologist, Gary Lincoff. Please visit their website to find out more about their upcoming events this fall.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Lucia Madriz
Food Artist: Lucia Madriz
Title: All Under Control, 2007
Ingredients: Rice and Beans Installation
Dimensions: 1.2m x 1.2m
Interpretation: The installations made of basic grains are concerned about genetic modified food – it became clear in my country the need to implement laws to protect Costa Rica’s rural agricultural practices, biodiversity and environment. When we talk about genetic modified food we are talking about alimentary sovereignty and an economic model of dependency. The arguments on favor are weak but the money interest behind are huge. Just imagine that no seed in the world will be for free or organic.Within all this battle field of fuel crisis, environmental impacts and starving populations, the money makers are talking about Biofuel out of corn, Ethanol, without considering other ways like electricity, solar energy, recycled oil, etc. Imagine that in order to supply US use of oil you need to take 25 States to grow corn. So, where will be the space for food?It doesn’t matter how you create a business. It is all about Means to an end… We are not longer there, we cannot afford that irresponsibility any more because we might finally achieve The End.
Bio: I work in order to have the possibility to explore. I don’t consider myself as an artist that practices a specific field of art, like video, performance or painting; I like to think more of artists as explorers in many other fields than the technical: the visual, the poetic, the political. My work is concerned with the social impacts of politics and power, how we all become means to an end (nature, people, society)I am interested in environmental issues in general but slowly this focus is shifting towards the individual: how is our relationship with nature? Is there a distance between nature and our lives? Is it the result of culture or is there a real need for it?
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Yolanda Shoshana
Food Artist: Yolanda Shoshana, Luscious Lifestyle Diva
Title: Aphrodisiacs
Ingredients: 20-min performance, peppermints, blackberries, pears, dark chocolate bar, sweet almond oil, rose water
Interpretation: “Aphrodisiacs” is a pleasurable multi-media performance art that takes the audience into the world of sexy food. Moderne Cortisane will present four delicious food aphrodisiacs with secrets created by her made from sexy oils and food notes. The audience will smell, touch, taste, listen, and in this fete of the senses, showing them how they have means to their fingertips to create an erotic food experience.
Bio: Yolanda Shoshana aka “The Luscious Lifestyle Diva” is a personality, courtesan coach, lifestle expert, burlesque dancer, and speaker. She produces and hosts her own talk show for women in Manhattan on Channel 56, titled “The Luscious Life with Shoshi.” She is also the Founder/Head Diva for The Diva’s School for the Art of Seduction. She is a food enthusiast, clothing junkie, and chocoholic that lives and rocks it in Harlem.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Ben Pinder
Food Artist: Ben Pinder
Title: Grog Bar
Ingredients: Bar, carboys, lime juice, rum, water, honey cake, hardtack, performance
Size: 7′ x 7′
A makeshift bar, created from found materials, will be built in the exhibition space. In the middle will be three large glass carboys; one filled with rum, one with water, one with lime juice. A barkeep will serve grog (water, rum, and lime juice) to visitors. Also available from the bar will be honey cake and hardtack, old nautical foods that will be passed by barmaids.
Interpretation: What are means of merriment? Gone are the swanky, exclusive clubs, he expensive dinners, eating out for every meal and the over the top drink prices. Instead, dive bars, thrift stores, staying in, and simplicity are making a comeback. When it is time for celebrating, where can we look for economic and simplistic means for merrymaking? I propose we look to the Age of Sail, where tiny ships at sea for months can serve as a microcosm for our own small world. On ships, close quarters meant people were forced to work together. Celebratory events meant receiving only extra portions of meager rations. In these tough times, we should appreciate what little we have. It’s time we remember to celebrate by enjoying the company of others. In this way are the means of merriment accessible to us all. Eat, drink, and be merry!
Bio: Ben Pinder lives with his wife Molly in Brooklyn, NY. Ben has a BFA from the University of Delaware and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, and has studied in New Zealand and Italy. Since graduating, Ben has exhibited in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. In 2008 he was a speaker for the symposium “The Relevance of Art in an Age of Global Warming” at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Pa. This corresponded with the exhibition “Global Warming at the Icebox” where Ben also exhibited his project “Return to Symzonia”, a satiric multimedia installation created specifically for the show. Together, Ben and Molly, who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, create videos and performances that involve preparing and serving food.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Lagusta Yearwood
Food Artist: Lagusta Yearwood, Lagusta’s Luscious
Title: At Home in the World: Chocolate Words on Parchment Paper
Ingredients: Chocolate words on parchment paper, parchment paper, chocolate, tempering machine, pastry bag
Size: 5′ x 8′
Interpretation: As a food activist who earns a living through chocolate-making, I see my chocolate business as a way to express my political values. I use sustainable chocolate that is made by a small company that is committed to environmental responsibility and works directly with farmers to ensure that their cacao beans are harvested without child slavery (which is, horribly, common practice in the mainstream chocolate industry). My chocolates are all vegan, so they do not participate in the system of institutionalized cruelty that is the dairy industry. A core value of my business is that ethical and sustainable foods are more deeply nourishing than their mainstream counterparts. Poetry is a similarly transformative and nourishing art from, thus combining the two doubles their power. Manipulating the chocolate words into a nest and inviting viewers to take (and eat) words from the piece serves several purposes. Primarily it is a statement about the global home we share, and the ways ethically-produced chocolate improves it. As well, it is a comment on the flexible nature of language and poetry, and how the act of interacting with words changes our relationship to them as well as each other.
Bio: Lagusta Yearwood is a chef and chocolatier in New Paltz, New York. Her business, Lagusta’s Luscious, is divided into two parts: a small vegetarian home meal delivery service that provides handmade meals made with local organic ingredients to busy families and professionals, and Bluestocking Bonbons: a line of organic, fair-trade and vegan chocolates named for innovative women throughout history.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Sweet Tooth of the Tiger
Food Artist: Tracy Candido, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger
Title: Tin Can Cake Workshop
Ingredients: Flour, Sugar, Oil, Spices, Soy Milk, Fruit
Dimensions: Varied
Interpretation: The Tin Can Cake Workshop uses equipment usually associated with survival (tin cans as bakeware and the grill in place of an oven) to make a dessert that is technically non-essential food. We not only restructure the organization of domestic space and tools, but we also expose utopian narrative so often associated with community or participatory art. By cooking sugary cake in the tin cans and not something more substantial or biologically necessary, we are creating an imaginary space considered to be harmonious and pleasurable; we are making participants happy through their sugar high instead of allowing them to focus on real, concrete aspects of survival.
Bio: Sweet Tooth of the Tiger is part entrepreneurial/d.i.y. food service project and part participatory art project that uses sugar as a medium and explores eating as social practice. The project takes the form of a bake sale that utilizes the community and public sphere as a place for eating, feeding, and talking with your mouth full. Sweet Tooth is invited by members of its community to set up a bake sale table at awesome events and engage with participants by exchanging baked goods for some money. Hopefully, participants are activated by their sugar high to engage in conversation with other participants, heightening their awareness of their own social position as well as a broadened perspective concerning their environment.
Native New Yorker Tracy Candido began Sweet Tooth of the Tiger as a way to talk with people about dessert; she had an insatiable curiosity about their food memories, family baking history, and favorite flavors of sweets. Sweet Tooth also allows Tracy to explore the theories behind food as a medium in art and culture, participatory and interactive art practice, the transaction between maker and consumer, and the idea of the reorganization of the hierarchy in domestic spaces. Tracy holds a Master’s Degree from New York University in Visual Culture Theory.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Meg Duguid and Catie Olson
Food Artist: Meg Duguid and Catie Olson
Title: Pie Art
Ingredients: papier mache, paint, wood, glue, fabric, adhesives, nails
Size: 24″ diameter
Interpretation: This larger than life-sized sculptural lemon meringue pie that has a slice taken out of it is Duguid and Olson’s take on pie and high art. In the place where the slice would have been, a two-person exhibition: white walls, wood floor, and track lighting. This is their “slice of the gallery” so to speak. Duguid and Olson will show a miniature retrospective of their pie art work. Next to the Pie Art space, a sculptural pie slicer with the cut out piece of pie. The slice allows the viewer to see the internal pie layers since the slice will have “white pie cube” walls.
Creating their work using an iterative structure, Duguid and Olson let their play-on-word conversations lead their projects. Coming from the exploration of the joke and how it is broken down, our most recent set of word plays has been all about pieing. Pieing has been a staple of slapstick comedy for years, and we have been in the process of exploring that symbology to find the true and multiple meanings of pie.
Their term “pieness” refers to a more open structure that permits humor, body, and food to exist simultaneously. Although they bring different talents and experiences to the table, humor binds their minds. Placing humor within public and performative settings that keeps them on their topsy-turvy toes and continues to enthrall them with revoluntionary ideas of comedy.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Suko Presseau
Food Artist: Suko Presseau
Title: Thunder Moon Offering
Size: 24″ x 30″ x 5″
Ingredients: Archival Inkjet/Lightbox, Animal Tongue, Animal Heart, Spices
Interpretation: Thunder Moon Offering (light box) is part of a larger body of work called The New Thunder Moon in Leo. Equal parts performance, sculpture, photography, neo-pagan ritual and play, the artifacts document a gesture of appreciation and offering in honor of a bountiful harvest. The tongue and the heart symbolize the essential intention of the ritual. The tongue is the organ of tasting, talking, kissing, and the heart is of the soul, representation of life force, and love. Together, they resemble male and female genitalia, and become talismans of fertility. The light box is a single, unique object (outside the edition of prints that is also part of the series) and has an extra bit of playfulness and acknowledgment of how ritual and magic is also a part of daily life–in the fridge, next to the Chinatown grocery bag and condiments. The work relates to the idea of “Means” as they are about acknowledging the means by which I procure my food.
Bio: Suko Presseau is an artist working in Brooklyn and farming with McEnroe farms in Millerton, NY. She was born in New York, NY and recieved her BA and BFA from Hunter College. Suko has exhibited internationally and has been featured in the NY Times. Her work features food and plants as a medium.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Anne Apparu
Food Artist: Anne Apparu
Title: Planted Dinner for 4
Medium: Seasonal Vegetables, Recipes, Found Wood Raised Bed, Dirt
Interpretation: How we can have clean food grown locally using found bits and pieces and saving seeds and refuse for growing and composting.
Bio: Anne Apparu cooks and puts moments together using permaculture principles in our ever-changing city.
Last Supper Food Artist 2009 – Wild Feasties
Food Artist: Wild Feasties (Logan Smith, Carissa Carman, Eliza Stamps, Emily Bolevice)
Title: Table for Two
For The Last Supper, the Wild Feasties proposes a dining experience in an unusual location, using whole food ingredients, where participants are asked to engage and follow a series of instructions and ritual to share a delectable vegetarian meal. Wild Feasties uses the routine of eating as a way of inserting instruction, interactivity, natural foods education, wild food concocting, tasting, experimenting with taste, seasoning with potions, and bringing a sense of true nourishment in a moment of chaotic artistic social affairs. If you feel good you live better. We are providing a means when no one has any. The 15 minute meals of Wild Feasties are hope, nourishment, and by no means a mean to the end, but a means to something better… a refresh… a new friend, and new taste… a wild feast!
Bio:
Wild Feasties is a loose collective of artists and naturalists who all engage with food within their creative endeavors. These endeavors may take place in the studio, in the kitchen, or out in the world. Through our events, we aim for our guests to have an artful food experience; one that stirs the senses, both literally and figuratively. Our cuisine is typically simple, with an emphasis on celebrating the incredible taste of farm fresh vegetables. Wild Feasties events emerge from the location upon which they are set. The menu is determined entirely by what the harvest brings. In early fall, the harvest menu could be: Kale Purses with seared chippoline onions and local goat cheese, Roasted leek risotto, Butternut Buttons, Finger Lakes salt potatoes
Last Supper Food Art 2009 – Christina Kelly
Food Artist Christina Kelly
Title: Maize Field
Ingredients: harvested corn that I am drying for seed, as well as photographs, text and drawings, narrative of artistic inquiry
New York City is constantly changing. From the very beginning the development of this city has depended upon the displacement of people, native flora, fauna and ways of life. On the other hand, recently, there has been positive change in the city as well. Natural areas are now being cleared of invasive species and are starting to thrive once more. Waterfronts are becoming more accessible. Community gardens and small urban farms grow in what were once vacant lots.
The MAIZE FIELD project aims to draw attention to and participate in the continual change that defines the city by highlighting a lost historical past then integrating that history back into the present landscape.
This summer I planted two “Three Sisters Gardens” with native varieties of corn, beans and squash as part of my research for MAIZE FIELD. The companion planting system of the Three Sisters Garden is a great metaphor for community, as the success of the corn depends also on the beans and the squash. And nutritionally the three compliment each other. There is both an elegance and beauty to the planting system and garden itself. Saving seeds from this year’s crop for the next year’s project helps both to keep viable these varieties of corn and in itself is a gesture of sustainability.
Bio
Christina Kelly is a Brooklyn based visual artist and film/video editor. She has a BA in English Literature from Barnard College (’93) and an MFA in Film/Video from Bard (’00). As an editor her feature film credits include Off Duty (dir. Vijay Mathew), A Four Letter Word (dir. Casper Andreas) and Church and State (dir. Eric Weber) and Betweeen Love and Goodbye (dir Casper Andreas). She also edited Describe Video, a single channel video installation by Judy Radul, and worked as an assistant editor on Ramin Bahrani’s films Man Push Cart and Chop Shop. She is a frequent contributor to the PBS program In the Life.
Christina’s recently exhibited work includes “ChandelAir Flight 69″ (2005), “You Burn Me” (2006), “Gowanus Oyster Shrines” (2008), and “Pay Dirt Transforming the Economy” (2009). This summer, as part of her Maize Field project she is planting three sister’s gardens with native varieties of corn and beans in Prospect Park and on the Waterpod.
Last Supper Food Art 2009- Francis Estrada
Food Artist Francis Estrada
Title: Sacred Sangria
Ingredients: Oil and gold leaf on bottle, local red wine, local fruits
At a time of crisis (personal, societal, or global), it is easy for people to seek comfort in various vices. Over the last few years, it has interested me how, when people go to a bar (including myself) and sit on a barstool, they seem to look for redemption or enlightenment while (literally) looking up to bottles of alcohol for support, as one would sit on a pew and look up to saints in a church. This body of work, titled Spirits, is a response to this observation and interprets the theme of the exhibition through the process of how I transform my consumption into a means of creating new work. I have specifically chosen to use whisky bottles (Maker’s Mark and Jack Daniel’s) as the primary materials for this group. And my “spirits” of choice. By consuming the liquid and transforming the bottles to deities/spirits, I am then able to create “intermediaries” of my ideas, desires, hopes, and emotions. Consumption directly leads to my means of creating work.
Bio
Francis Estrada works in painting and drawing media and resides in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in California and has exhibited in California, Chicago, and New York City. Estrada works with appropriating images from paintings, archival photography, his own photographs, and sketches. He finds images within various said sources and places them in new, imaginary, or absent settings to explore the effects of the displacement and replacement of figures in various situations and environments. Often omitting, blurring, or fading some features, he encourages the viewer to closely investigate and interact with the figures in his work, which in turn get a “new life” of their own in their new environments. In rendering his chosen characters in new environments, he creates spaces for people and places to co-exist regardless of time.
Last Supper Food Art 2009 – Emily Miranda
Food Artist Emily Miranda
Title: Sugar Cake
Ingredients: Sugarpaste (powdered sugar, gum tragacanth, corn syrup, vegetable shortening), Royal Icing (powdered sugar, egg whites, water)
A vase, holding long, lush, lifelike stems of swiss chard. Both to be made entirely of sugarpaste and royal icing.
The consumption of sugar has always been political. At the time of its first introduction to Europe, it was available only for the very wealthy. The tradition of table sculptures made of sugar was a demonstration of extreme decadance and waste. Today, sugar and economic means remain closely linked. Those with money consume fresh, healthy food from places like “Whole Paycheck”, and choose to watch their sugar consumption for health. Those without means live in neighborhoods without farmers markets, but grocery stores with perpetual sales on soda and processed foods loaded with sugar. In a sense, they can’t afford not to consume sugar.
The proposed sugar sculpture will be made in the language of dutch still life painting, a genre which wasted food for art. Showcasing stems of swiss chard in the context of sugar removes the green, leafy vegetable from view as a modest farmer’s crop and places it as an indicator of political and economic consumption.
Bio
b. New Jersey 1973.
BFA painting, Rhode Island School of Design 1995
MFA painting, Hunter College 2004
Lives and works, making cakes and jewelry, in Brooklyn NY.
Last Supper 2009 Food Art – Amelia Coulter
Amelia Coulter Sugarbuilt
Title: Tools
Ingredients: Iced Sugar Cookie
Tools are Means. They are things we use to effectively facilitate what we do. These are my favorite kinds of objects, and we are intimately connected to them through designing them, using them, and experiencing the results.
Bio:
Amelia Coulter grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico surrounded with the rich history and intertwined cultures of that region. She studied sculpture at SUNY Purchase then moved Brooklyn to cook, learn and eat. She loves patterns, architecture, design, and decorative arts. She is inspired by regionally specific traditions and objects and is interested in the layers of information that they convey. Using structurally strong and tasty sugar cookie dough and royal icing, she interprets imagery into small, detailed art objects. Amelia is committed to integrating organic, local and contextually appropriate products as much as possible.
Last Supper 2009 Food Art – Eve + Bowie & Eliza
Project Candy by Eliza Myrie
Artist Eve + Bowie; & Eliza Myrie;
Title: Edible Ghetto/ Ghetto Edibles
Ingredients: Gingerbread
Size: Dimensions Variable
This cultural moment has provided us with a new awareness of how we shelter ourselves, in large part because what was assumed for many has been taken away; tent cities, foreclosure and homelessness are more pressing than ever. Additionally it magnifies the experience of those who have been dealing with transient and inadequate housing for much longer than the media frenzied natural disasters we are all so familiar with. Housing ghettos are representative of people finding a way within their “means”. What does it mean to re-image something regarded in the cultural imagination as sweet and innocent? What about the more sinister side of the “Hansel and Gretel” fable or the implications surrounding shelter/home as sustenance? The piece “edible ghetto/ghetto edibles”, an edible structure drawing from the architecture of tenements, abandoned factory towns, projects, and row houses, finds the participants/viewers ingesting the concepts and issues surrounding these spaces. At once the imminent destruction is a chance to grow something from nothing and examine the destruction we are ourselves responsible for.
Bio: Eve + Bowie are artists who live and work in New York City. Through provocative work, conversation and private thought we cause people to question and expand their perceptions with the firm belief that challenging the way people thing can bring about social awareness and change. Eliza Myrie is a New York transplant making a way in Chicago as an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. Through observation and consideration of urban space my work attempts to strip down and re organize icons and cultural expectations to begin conversations regarding social realities of our contemporary world.
The Last Supper Film Festival is an indoor-outdoor film, food, music and art festival occuring in Brooklyn during the crux of seasonal change in September. Referencing the celebratory nature of the feast, and the symposium of genres, the festival kindles the creative miasma sparked by NY's peppery fall and inventive community.The last exposure to outdoor interaction before the shearing winter...