NYAB Event - “cu·li·nar·y” Exhibition

“cu·li·nar·y” Exhibition

BRAC @ Bronx Music Heritage Center

This event has ended.

The Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) presents cu·li·nar·y, the fifth and final exhibition in our 2015 series focused on food and its importance for the health and well-being of Bronxites of all ages.

cu·li·nar·y offers artworks that relate to the preparation, cooking and presentation of foods that nourish, inspire, entertain and are familiar in a family-friendly way. Cooking and meal-making is an important issue at a time when the Bronx faces a growing health crisis, where obesity and hunger are both rampant due to poor nutrition. The Bronx has the city’s highest rates of obesity and twice the national average of residents who say they are not able to afford healthy food. It is a troubling fact that Bronxites do not have convenient or affordable access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The intent of this exhibition is to offer creative and educated ways to prepare, present and enjoy one’s food, such that we learn to “eat to live”, rather than “live to eat”, and that we can encourage people to find ways to achieve better health through healthier foods. The artists in this show reflect upon this concept through various cultural and visionary perspectives.

Bronx native Ira Merritt documents local families coming together in his Van Cortlandt Park series, as they connect through the preparation and consumption of their family meal. The photos are laid out in a grid to show the similarities of the extended family structures and in a way they become a tribe of many families.”The barbecue is the glue that brings the family together.”

Nicole Dextras’ Urban Foragers film describes her series of Botanical WearAbles, wearable architectures that transform the structure of the hoop skirt into portable shelters and gardens. Each outfit promotes growing one’s own food supply, and a communal meal is made from the food sources they each carry in their self sufficient dresses.

Gayle Saunders offers exquisite presentations of food in her still-life photography series Salad Days, creating ephemeral arrangements of healthy and foraged ingredients such as edible flowers, leaves, greens and peppers. The resulting images are printed on Japanese kozo and saturated with beeswax, in reference to the dwindling honeybee population that greatly affects our food production.

Irina Danilova’s performance project, DINNER 59, is represented by video sequenced images that present 21 completed dinners of a planned 59 series of dinners, each to take place on important days related to the number 59. The work presents meal-making as a repetitive ongoing project, cooked roughly every 59 days from recipes found on page 59 of various cookbooks.

Mie Yim’s small and delicate pastel drawings explore the presentation and aesthetic of food preparation, intimately depicting familiar foods in miniature on Martha Stewart paint chips with colors that complement each subject. The works are meant to be shared like food, the notion of giving food is such a warm, memory invoking activity, but not always practical or possible.

Michael Pribich’s project Bolsas, addresses the hand-to-mouth relationship of work and sustenance for immigrant workers. His project A Mexican In Every Kitchen, concerns the exploitation of Mexican kitchen workers in New York City’s massive food and restaurant industries. Pribich slyly makes his point using loaded word associations in combination with minimalist forms of kitchen utensils and equipment.

The Food Systems, Surroundings and Sensibilities series, and cu·li·nar·y is a part of BRAC’s larger curatorial effort to draw attention to food as a creative medium, muse and indicator of culture; and to highlight social and political issues related to food and health, especially those impacting the Bronx community.

More about the exhibitions series:
This exhibition series is designed to shine light on the fact that although The Bronx is at the heart of New York City’s food system (the Bronx Terminal Produce Market supplies fruits and vegetables to supermarkets and restaurants across the city, feeding millions of its inhabitants), ironically, many parts of the borough are identified as “food deserts.” This paradox engenders questions that this exhibition series seeks to answer: How are Bronx residents affected by the available food choices? What are the challenges for a 21st-century city to feed all of its population? How are ideas of sustainability, livability and healthy environments being explored in our borough; and how should they be implemented for the future health and well-being of our community? What roles can artists, community organizations and local activists play within these scenarios? The conceptual framework of Food: Systems, Surroundings & Sensibilities addresses these questions in order to identify inspiring and achievable solutions through the cross-fertilization of artists with our community’s diverse groups of inhabitants, and within its specific and distinctive landscape.

Media

• Photography
• Installation

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