Artists Ponder Food: Tanya Schultz Creates Fantastical Sugar Landscapes

Australian artist Tanya Schultz, otherwise known as Pip & Pop, creates immersive, large scale installations and artworks from a wide range of materials including sugar, glitter, candy, plastic flowers, and other mixed media. Schultz describes her work as, "Often ephemeral, her meticulously constructed and highly detailed works embrace notions of abundance, utopian dreams and fleeting pleasure." She is also "fascinated with ideas of paradise and wish-fulfillment described in folk tales, mythologies and cinema."

Seeing Forever
Tanya Schultz, 2012
Kuandu Biennial, Taipei

Candy Lab
Tanya Schultz, 2014
Mediamatic, Amsterdam

Artists Ponder Food - Valerie Belin wins 2015 Prix Pictet

The photographs of Valerie Belin speak simply of our 21st century obsessiveness and materialism with a fetid richness that reminds me of my childhood captivation with the paintings of Ivan Albright.

Ivan Albright, Flesh (Smaller than Tears Are the Little Blue Flowers), 1928

The iconography of Valérie Belin’s photographs is silent. It has that silence that precedes disasters and then follows them. The silence of accidents, the spectacular labyrinths of glass and mirrors, of ceremonies, the bodies and faces where we do not know whether the beings they belonged to are still alive. The absence of any dramatisation, the determination not to strive for effect, come together in the production of images without affection. Even with themes, figures and subjects that bring a whole culture of expressiveness with them.What is this ailment which is both contained and exposed? The paradox that runs through all her work makes up its aesthetic purpose but also seems to be tributary to a situation typical of the history of art in the late 20th century.....That is when the brilliance of black reveals the substance of a morbid aesthetic. Morbidity, despite its first syllable, is not death; it refers to sickness. And so this may be a sick relation with culture described by the delicate treatment of flesh, the very definition of sickly grace: morbidezza. - Michel Poivert

 How appropriate Belin has won this year's Prix Pictet

The mission of Prix Pictet is to the search for photographs that communicate messages of global significance under the broad theme of sustainability. For the Sixth Prix Pictet the theme is Disorder. Previous laureates of the award have been Benoit Aquin (Water), Nadav Kander (Earth), Mitch Epstein (Growth), Luc Delahaye (Power) and Michael Schmidt (Consumption).In his foreword to the accompanying book, Disorder, Kofi Annan writes, “Our times are defined by Disorder – disorder, at the very moment in human history when we almost dared imagine that no problem was beyond our capacity to solve. Remarkable advances in medicine have helped to eradicate scores of formerly fatal diseases. We are capable of breathtaking feats of engineering – raising mighty dams, flood defences and soaring earthquake-proof buildings. Our mastery over manifold aspects of life has deluded us into thinking that we have bent the planet to our will. Yet the fragility of that assumption is exposed with each new pandemic, earthquake, tsunami or drought. With each passing day our illusion of order is shattered.”An exhibition of the images shortlisted for the award will now tour the world. The tour begins at MAXXI in Rome and will then travel to major international museums and galleries including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva; Westbau, Zurich; CAB (Contemporary Art Brussels), the Palau Robert, Barcelona and the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego. Proposals from other leading galleries and museums are currently under review.

Chips #4, 2004

Bob #5, 2012

Still Life with Vase, 2014

Fruits Baskets, Untitled, 2007

Artists Ponder Food: Tara Sellios -- Still Life and Marine Life

From the series, Luxuria, 2013

Sellios' artist statement: I strive to create images that elegantly articulate the totality of existence, focusing heavily on the broad themes of life and death, with further emphasis placed on ideas of fragility, impermanence and carnality. 

Interview with Pete Brook: Sugar-Coated, Corn-Fed Dioramas Query Big-Ag’s Food Production and the Naturalness of Landscape

We were thrilled to be interviewed by freelance writer and curator, Pete Brook 
posted on Prison Photography.org
30 June 2014

HISTORY, NATURE AND LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

Today, June 30th, marks the 150th anniversary of The Yosemite Grant, signed by Abraham Lincoln, putting the protection of Yosemite Valley into the hands of the state of California with ‘the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation, for all of time. The grant was a precursor to land-use-law that later led to the establishment of the National Parks.

There can be no photographer better known for the early exploration of the American West as Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). Nor is there a mid-to-late 19th century photographer (Ansel Adams did his bit later!) who shaped public opinion about natural spaces as much as Watkins.

What would Watkins say about the RVs that roll into Yosemite and Yellowstone each year? What would Watkins say about the monoculture agribusiness that dominates large swathes of the United States’ land? What would Watkins make of the ubiquity of corn syrup in our diets?

“The series Processed Views interprets the frontier of industrial food production, the seductive and alarming intersection of nature and technology,” write Lindsay Lochman & Barbara Ciurej in their artist statement. As we move further away from the natural sources of our food, we head into uncharted territory replete with unintended consequences for the environment and for our health.”

Processed Views is a witty and painstakingly constructed project that gets at some serious issues. What were Lochman and Ciurej thinking? Exactly how did they piece together these distopic dioramas that drip with E-numbers?   

see our photographs, Watkins' inspirations and find out why   click  Q&A 

Processed Views on Lenscratch

We appreciate you kicked off the Lenscratch Collaborative Exhibition with our Processed Views.

In light of tomorrow’s Collaboration Exhibition, I thought it to be appropriate to share some collaborative work.  Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, from Chicago and Milwaukee respectively, have been collaborating as a team for over thirty years.  Through this process they explore unified interests that strengthen their conversations and ideas between each other.  Collaborating as a way of making photographs always poses questions of leaders and button pushers, but in the case of Barbara and Lindsay they develop and divide work evenly.  Whether shooting together or separately, depending on the project, they always regroup to edit and exhibit together.

Today I’m excited to share their project Processed Views, which I have been privileged to see behind the curtain.  Through constructed landscapes made strictly from foods that make the chubby kid inside me drool, Barbra and Lindsay develop a commentary on today’s food culture and its digression from all things natural.  These handmade models are elaborate creations, holding their own as not only photographs but also sculptures.

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman  began working together on photographic projects when they met as students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. They have developed an extensive body of collaborative work, chronicling rites of passage and documenting the psychological landscapes and social architecture that surround us.  The confluence of history, myth and popular culture is an ongoing theme in their collaborative work.

Exhibiting nationally and internationally, their photographs are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Walker Art Center and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Ciurej is a photographer and graphic designer in Chicago. Lochman is a Milwaukee-based photographer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin.
Thanks, fellow photographer and Lenscratch editor, Grant Gill.

Processed Views on Our Age is 13

Thank you, Molly Been, for this post in Our Age is 13 blog.

Consumed: Nourishment and Indulgence

installation shot, Ponder Food as Love

CONSUMED Nourishment and Indulgence

Curated by Jacqueline Nathan with Marce Dupay and Wynn Perry. 

Willard Winkleman Gallery

Bowling Green State University

September 6 - October 9 2013

Food is unlike any other object of consumption because it is necessary for life, yet we have highly complex societal, cultural and individual relationships with it. The work in this exhibition considers some of the issues, attitudes and associations that food engenders and symbolizes. Artists included

Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman 
Sue Coe
Sayaka Ganz
Jeph Gurecka
Mary Ellen Johnson
Judith Klausner 

Katharine Kuharic
Monika Malewska
Portia Munson
Debra Priestly
Tara Sellios
Dennis Wojtkiewicz
April Wood
Events:

ArtTalk: Sue Coe  Friday, September 13th at 7 p.m., followed by a reception for the artists.  Coe is renowned as an animal rights activist and artist. She recently published Cruel.

ArtTalk: Cynthia Baron Sunday, September 15th at 3 p.m. (immediately before the first film).   Watch What You Eat: Food Documentaries and the Counter-Cuisine Movement by this BGSU professor and co-author of Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film and the Politics of Representation (2013)

ArtTalk: Debra Priestly Monday, September 16th, at 5 p.m. Priestly''s prints and mixed media work often use canning jar images to indicate the preservation of African-American history.

Films included in the Sunday Munch series are: 

The Garden (2008): A group of mostly working class, Latino South Central farmers fought the good fight—and they''re still at it— for the basic human need to grow food. in this Academy Award nominated film.

Super Size Me (2004): A cult classic with Morgan Spurlock eating his way to bad health on a month''s worth of McDonalds.

Food, Inc.(2008) : The rock stars of the ethical eating movement —Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser— weigh in on all that is wrong in American''s industrialized food system.

Consumed Exhibition Poster

Real and Unreal Food: Research at WI State Fair 2013