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

Getty Photographs of Yosemite by Carleton E. Watkins

In this video, Matthew Butson, Vice-President of the Getty Images Archive, examines the now-iconic photographs of Carleton E. Watkins kept within the Archive's vintage vaults. Watkins was one of the earliest American landscape photographers, and in 1861, he set out to capture the untouched landscapes of Yosemite, California. These photographs of Yosemite set Watkin on the path to become, as Butson states, "a pioneering environmental photographer." The large scale of Watkins' images and plates allowed Watkins to reproduce every detail of the vast scenes he photographed. One of Watkins' albums of his Yosemite photographs was shown to President Abraham Lincoln by a senator, which inspired Lincoln to set forth and sign the Yosemite Grant Act in 1864. This Act determined that the area of Yosemite would be held and cared for by the State of California "for public use, resort, and recreation," and not developed by private, commercial enterprises. The preservation of Yosemite National State Park by state and federal resources paved the way for the designation of other national parks and monuments.

View from Camp Grove, Yosemite
Carleton E. Watkins, 1861
Albumen print

Visiting the Food Desert with Carleton Watkins

Our recent pondering of food is no longer about love, but about a celebration of industrialization. We have taken our initial inspiration from the great American photographers of the 19th century USGS Surveys who roamed the mountains and the deserts in search of uncharted territory to exploit. In this century Conagra, Monsanto, Kraft, et.al.  look to the resource of our physical biology as an ever growing market.

After Carleton Watkins, Mendocino River, California

Is this work political?  As much as the documentation of Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins.

Carleton Watkins, Mendocino River, l867