Artists:  Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw

Title: Jen-n-Outlaw’s Fish Fry Truck and Crawfish Boil

Jen-n-Outlaw’s Fish Fry Truck and Crawfish Boil is the latest public performance offered by the duo Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw. The food truck is the next installment of small businesses opened by the two in order to fulfill voids in a specific community. New York City, although vast in its cultural food experience, is lacking in the genre of Fish Fry’s and Crawfish Boils. At the same time, creating a restaurant experience is nearly impossible for the average to lower income entrepreneur. By manipulating a standard 1970’s bread truck into a hydraulic powered fold open platform, Catron and Outlaw have created and entire restaurant on wheels for fractional investments. The project serves the community by providing quality food and unconventional cultural experience and the community gives back by supporting the truck and allowing its operation to continue week to week. The artists themselves get lost in performance as they take on the roles of rural ambassadors to the largest urban population in America, educating the masses on how to eat mudbugs and what it means to noodle a catfish. A certain love for America and all that it entails is also not lost on the viewer and participant as they engorge themselves dishes that are uniquely American in the soft glow of the red white and blue.

Bio:  Paul Outlaw and Jennifer Catron both received their MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2009. Since that time, they have maintained a successful studio practice living and working in Brooklyn. Outlaw is originally from Fairhope, AL while Catron grew up in the town of Bluford in rural Southern Illinois. While maintaining individual studio practices, the two have also been collaborating on numerous projects in the realm of large scale performance and installation. Much of their collaborations revolve around ideas of the self-made business, symbiotic consumerism, capitalistic spectacle, and serial entrepreneurship. They have recently shown at Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelpia, PA; Maxon Mills, The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; and have been featured in the New York Times for their roving Fish Fry Truck and Crawfish Boil entitled Jen-n-Outlaw’s appearing around the streets of Brooklyn.

Artist:  Shelly Sabel

GRAND PRIZE WINNER–2010 GSS Jell-O Mold Competition

Title: Aspic Ascension–Tastes Like Heaven

Mold: food grade Silicon and Algene

Flavors: Bloody Mary—the flavor profile is classic and spicy, with beet juice for intense color.

A classic Jell-O dish, tomato aspic, made modern and irreverent by casting an effigy of “The Madonna” in full 3-D for a delicious boozy Bloody Mary.

Bio:  Shelly Sabel is an independent lighting designer based in New York.  She has designed lighting for high-end retail display; theater production; and art and design installations.  She also serves as an adjunct faculty member at NYU and Hunter College.

Artist:  littlefish farms

Title:  Arboravita (Tree of Life)

Crops:  sunflowers, strawberries, marigolds, amaranth, arugula, amaranth, tigger melon, holy basil, purslane, radishes, cactus, onion, oregano, spearmint, curry, yarrow, pink clove, red valerian, lemon verbana

Materials:  tires, Christmas tree stand, PVC pipe, carpet, chain link fencing, plywood, burlap coffee bags, homemade compost (all materials salvaged, reclaimed or donated)

“Between the street and the river of the great city grew a tree of life…its leaves were served as medicine for the healing of nations.”  ~ Book of Revelations 22:2

Selections from the harvest and take-home seedbags grown from the tree and its companion will be offered during the Last Supper Festival.  

Bio:  We at littlefish farms believe it is Just Time to initiate experiments in transforming waste and haste into health and wealth so that we all may rediscover our interwoven interdependence and a personal purposeful connection with the living beings that sustain and nourish us…including each other.   We welcome you to join us on our quixotic quest. 

Artist: Jan Habraken and Alissia Melka Teichroew

Title: Piggy Sandwiches

Ingredients: German rye bread, ham, cheese

Tool: Laser Cutter (courtesy  of NYDesigns)

When asked to come up with an idea of a product to test under the laser cutter at NYDesigns by Design Glut, Jan Habraken and Alissia Melka-Teichroew decided that they had cut pretty much every material but food. This is where the hunt started: what foods can we cut or etch at the same time creating something fun and something that would be too complicated to do manually (why else would you laser cut!). We decided sandwiches, pancakes, chocolate bars, sugar glass, tuna (can you imagine the seared edge the laser could make!). There was only time to etch some pancakes and cut some piggy “ham & cheese” sandwiches.

Bios: Alissia Melka-Teichroew, founder and creative director of byAMT Studio, is a New World-Old World mash-up. Daughter of a French mother and American father, she was born and raised in The Netherlands. A Design Academy Eindhoven graduate, she also holds a Masters from Rhode Island School of Design. After stints in Paris, San Francisco, and Boston, she now works in New York. While developing her own projects, she also worked at IDEO and Puma. Alissia’s transcontinental background is reflected in the fluidity and fluency of her designs.

“My design is characterized by a mixture of mass-market and couture,” explains industrial designer Jan Habraken. Born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands in 1975, Habraken studied architectural engineering before attending the world-renowned Design Academy Eindhoven. Immediately following graduation he co-founded WATdesign.  After five years of making and exhibiting products and furniture internationally, the designer moved to New York City, where he established Studio Jan Habraken in 2008.

Artist: Atom Cianfarani

Title: CONSUME LOVE

Artist and leading sustainable designer Atom Cianfarani is creating a food cart reminiscent of her Italian ancestors. This cart however is a little different. Named CONSUME LOVE, Cianfarani presents a venue where visitors can engage in alternate forms of consumption. Guests will enjoy homemade food re-directed from the waste-stream by way of freeganism, and join Cianfarani is discussing some of the most pressing issues of our contemporary moment.

Bio: Atom Cianfarani is an artist and leading sustainable designer. She was the first to discuss recycled materials at New York’s Fashion week with her innovative fashion line Gaelyn&Cianfarani; developed the most sustainable restaurant in North America; received a 2009 sculptural commission from New York City’s Department of Transporation; is a leading green-roof designer; and is now co-authoring a series of green it yourself guides.  Her practice is rooted in ecological preservationist ideology as it manifests through conscientious and creative processes, using New York City garbage to generate urban renewal.

Artist: Yuka Otani

Title:  Sweet Vessels

Ingredients: Granulated sugar, corn syrup, food color

Sweet Vessels is a series of tableware that are made of molten sugar using the techniques of glassmaking. Due of the perishable nature of the material, objects melt down over the time. Sometimes they become opaque, sometimes they increase the transparency, depending on the temperature and humidity of the place they are exhibited.

Bio: Yuka Otani’s sculptures and installations incorporate transparent and fluid materials such as glass, water, melted sugar and light to invoke a shift in a viewer’s perception of physical and cognitive spaces. The vulnerable materials change their appearance over time, thereby simultaneously emphasizing both presence and absence.

Artist: Design Glut, Liz Kinnmark and Kegan Fisher

Title: Subculture Cookie Cutters

Subculture cookie cutters – cutting culture from stock molds.

Bio: Design Glut creates housewares, jewelry, and accessories that tell stories with unexpected twists. Founded by Liz Kinnmark and Kegan Fisher in 2007, this Brooklyn-based duo has quickly learned the ropes of running a manufacturing business and is proud to bring you high design at approachable prices. Our objects start conversations, cause you to crack a smile, add something meaningful to your life.

Artist: Matt Brown

Title: Food and the Future of It–Egg Printer

This device grows and cooks eggs with yolks in any pattern or shape.  The premise behind it and the broader “Food and the Future of It” project is that the devises either print food or grow food:  “The ones that grow food do it by duplicating cells and proteins (something that we do now to get our lab grown meat). The printers use the same technology (only smaller and better) as the 3D printers that we have now. For this world, I’ve made some small devices that could exist. Human Creativity is absolutely amazing, and I’m confident that if people could design their own custom eggs, pasta, snacks, and other things then they would.”

Bio: Matt works as an interaction/industrial Designer at IDEO in Boston.  He spends most of his time outside of work looking for strange things at thrift stores and garage sales, trying to play his keyboards, and coming up with ideas.  He writes the Design Fancy column for Core77, a monthly piece that focuses on a fictional designer and the things that they did during their careers.  Matt received his BA in Industrial Design at Kendall College of Art and Design in Michigan, and his MA in Interaction Design at the Umeå Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden.

Artist: Nicole Stowe

Title: Food Memory Prints

Medium: Silkscreen

My block print series explores food and memory. Representing foods with the simpler shapes of block prints elevates them to the iconic – almost as if they were logos. And it allows me to represent these iconic images, not realistically, but how you might remember something in a dream or seen through the lens of many years. Or, how your memory might even mix and match associations, for instance, bandanas and popsicles both remind you of summer. Food is comfort, and just a smell or color or shape can remind you of something you forgot you knew and loved.

Bio: Nicole Stowe is an Art Director working and eating in Jackson, Mississippi. She recently participated in the Gowanus Studio Space Jell-O Mold Competition, taking home the Creativity award. In July 2010 she designed a “Sea Urchin Lamp” for One Blu Wall’s annual furniture show. She has also participated in Stephanie Syjuco’s Counterfeit Crochet Bag Project which toured just about around the world.

Artist: Emma Alonze

Title: In the Cold Light of Day

Ingredients: Sandwich supplies;  video performance

I was thinking about the difference in size of consumables. The amount of food we eat and how we go about it. About the waste we leave behind us as well as our wants and needs. I also wanted to see if it were possible to make a sandwich from a full loaf of bread. It was.

Emma Alonze is a UK-based artist with an eclectic approach to material and processes. She is fascinated by the everyday and tries to use it as a kind of material. Work is generated quickly and she regularly uses objects that crop up in everyday life/living because they are there, at hand, ready and waiting to be incorporated into a piece of work.