Food Fight _friday, march 12_10:45–12:15 (eastern us)_
During the first months of the pandemic the intimate connection of food and our stability was amplified. We stockpiled beans, devoured ice1 cream novelties and became increasingly aware of the instability and inequity of the entire food system. While providing a path to comfort, this solitary consumption led to moments of not just personal anxiety but a consideration of our roles as perpetrators of an unsustainable ecosystem. Food is a product of a larger human network that has harnessed its power for community, ceremony, and sustenance. We will be discussing, not only the historically symbiotic nature of political prints and food justice, but the very acts of printing and their parallels to the act of cooking. Through this panel we will bring to the table artists who are working with personal and cultural representations of food, but also artists planting seeds of a reimagined sustainable landscape. Our panelists will be serving their research in the form of playful tablescapes, personal narratives and radical care for the planet whose cycles sustain us.
Muriel Condon, Panel Chair
MFA student, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
After being born in a trailer by midwife, Muriel Condon grew up near the Montana town of Bozeman. She received her BFA from Montana State University in Printmaking and Painting in 2016. That summer she was an assistant at Frogman’s Print Workshops in Omaha, Nebraska. Soon after the workshops wrapped up, she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she has resided for three years. She spent the spring of 2017 exploring the interaction of cloth and print as a postgraduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. In Eugene, Oregon, Muriel continued to work with fabric and printing at Whiteaker Printmakers, where she eventually worked as a summer assistant. Having access to a community studio has allowed her to continue her practice, show around the region, and participate in multiple print exchanges. Before moving to Knoxville, she participated in the Print Arts Northwest’s Emerging Printmaker residency and was an instructional assistant for screen printing at Linn-Benton Community College. murielcondon.com
Dustin Brinkman MFA student, The Ohio State University
"Croperation." I will present my current creative research within the fields of ecology, human and non-human actors, stewardship of land, and how the self-narrative allows me to understand my relationship and culpability within these issues. The writing of philosophers and ecologists such as Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter and Bill Mollison in Permaculture – A Designers Manuel have illuminated a very serious fact that the natural materials in our world, specifically food, often times are treated as objects rather than actants or participant with their own agency. My presentation will address my works and writings in how they display my thoughts on the ways we treat our food and what a regenerative relationship between crops and people may look like. By placing myself in the printed image either cooperating with or endangering this matter I am able to depict a relationship and position that breaks from the normal rhetoric. Since 1970 we have lost nearly 94% of all species of produce that existed in the world yet corn can be found in almost every processed food and profitable practice. Corn itself has a rich history and is cared for in more precious ways beyond what we know in the accepted practices of the United States. If we hope to survive the next 60 years, we need to change not only our narratives around crop production, but we must find the common ground that places us beside the food we consume, rather than above it.
Dustin Brinkman is an artist and printmaker who is currently living in Columbus, OH. Dustin received his BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2016 and will receive his MFA from Ohio State University in the Spring of 2021. Dustin’s current series of work reflects upon his relationship to an agricultural landscape and what it means to be a consumer while also caring for the land which provides sustenance. Through his research in ecology and philosophy, Dustin has begun to engage within his practice the reforming of a relationship between the human and non-human actants that exist in his self-narratives. www.img-obj.com/dustin-brinkman
Wuon-Gean Ho PhD student, CFPR, University of the West of England
"Dream Lunch." In this talk I will look at personal depictions of food and consider how these have changed in recent months of solitude. I will also reflect on how printmaking has some parallels with cooking, in the gathering of ingredients with a goal in mind, and how the viewing of the end-product has parallels with the consumption of sweet treats. My fellowship at The Royal Academy Schools in 2016 started this culinary contemplation. There was a chef whose daily feasts soothed and fattened us up. Being of Chinese heritage, food is an important means of communication, sharing and celebration. My Singaporean and Malaysian family are shown in many works. During this recent enforced solitude, I started to make numerous prints of comfort-eating and drinking alone. “Dream Lunch” describes an imagined menu of grilled mackerel, stuffed with onions and crushed peppercorns and cardamom, with steamed rice, and raspberries and icecream for afters. The print contains an explicit desire to share a specific meal with friends and family.
Wuon-Gean Ho was born in Oxford, and graduated with a BA in History of Art from Cambridge University, before taking up a Japanese Government Scholarship in 1998 to study woodblock printmaking in Japan. She later studied MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, graduating with a distinction in 2016, and then was a printmaking fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in London.
Currently she is a PhD student at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), University of West of England, Bristol, UK, researching the conveyance of touch in printmaking through time-based media. She is also the inaugural editor of the IMPACT Printmaking Journal, an academic peer-reviewed journal published by the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of West England. www.wuongean.com
Diane Langevin BA student (Art History), Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University
"Mad Comfort." The artist explores their personal emotion and experiences with their mental health. Working in print often emphasizes repetition: these same patterns of habit are seen in both food consumption and anxiety surrounding the consumption of food. The artist confronts common stereotypes, assumptions and misunderstandings associated with mental health by using various mediums to create and express meaning. The prints are also visual record of the artist’s experience coping with what is described as “mental illness” by the medical community. These experiences exist individually as memories and collectively as a living document. Often those with mental health issues are in precarious states of existence. Access to art or the museum is limited or non-existent for these communities. This work draws attention to the potential of those in our communities living with mental illness and offers a first hand experience living within the social structure of “mental illness.”
Diane Langevin is an Indigenous Art History student at NSCAD University. Her prints explore emotions and experiences with what is described as mental illness. Working in print often emphasizes repetition—this is an aspect of anxiety as well and in some forms, how it manifests itself within the individual. dianelangevin.wixsite.com
Ashlee Mays recent MFA graduate, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
"The Museum of Infinite Outcomes." Perched alongside Knoxville’s chestnut ridge sits the Museum of Infinite Outcomes, a museum of conservation. To conserve something is to preserve it with care. As an open-air museum, our collection meanders through sun-filled gardens, collaborating with the outside world to demonstrate that the things in our reality can only exist in terms of relationships. The production of food is employed as a practical solution in a food apartheid, as well as a physical hinge holding together the museum’s exhibits. Consider the heterotroph: something that must eat something else to sustain life. Outside, plants cling tight to the earth below them, patiently performing alchemy in the setting sun. Quietly, they transform its rays into a sustaining stream of life, like water into wine. Humans, like you and me, are not so graceful. It may be no secret to either of us that to participate in our human built world is unsustainable. To support our bodies, something must die, and more often than not that death comes in the form of cheap gasoline and non-biodegradable plastics. Can we rewrite these relationships? Can we engage in sustainable cycles of living and dying together?
Ashlee Mays is an artist, printmaker, and director of the Museum of Infinite Outcomes. Her work crosses genres of art, ecology, pseudoscience, and game theory. Mays is a 2020 Artist-in-Residence with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and occasionally moonlights as a landscape painter (black and white only.) Mays earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA from the University of Tennessee in 2020. She is fond of geese, ducks, gardens and those who keep them. museumofinfiniteoutcomes.com