VORACIOUS EYE

Abrazo Gallery, The Clemente, 2nd floor
August 7 - August 26, 2019
Gallery Hours 3:30 - 7pm daily
Reception and Pot Luck - Tuesday, August 20th, 6 - 9pm

Curated by Suzanne Varni and Linda Griggs

Food is Love, an Object, in Danger, a Danger, Entertainment, Symbolic, a Cypher, a Seduction, and a Substitute for the Body.
Food may well have been art’s first subject. The oldest known are Indonesian cave paintings of a pig and bull at 35,400 and 40,000 years old respectively.
In the last ten years or more the conversation around food has expanded. Some include wars that result from food insecurity and their impact on the environment, the use of GMOs in agribusiness, urban food deserts, and the depletion of the oceans. Personal conversations center around food allergies, both deadly and imagined. When food is entertainment we talk about celebrity chefs and destination restaurants. Food may well have been art’s first subject. The oldest known are Indonesian cave paintings of a pig and bull at 35,400 and 40,000 years old respectively.
From mythology and fairytales come the horror of children devoured; from nature, the male consumed by the female; and from the most primal places, an atavistic hunger that engulfs even itself.
This show explores foods’ varied meanings including pointed political abstractions, voluptuousness and the body, and fond, regional memories.

–– Linda Griggs

Edible Options

Everyone can relate to eating in some way or another. It is an act that people execute similarly but experience differently, often in very personal ways. The eclectic group of visual artists whose work appears in the exhibition serves up a wide assortment of interpretations on this common theme. Though the artworks are all directly or indirectly inspired by the concept of eating, the content and execution is remarkably varied. The mediums of painting, photography, and sculpture are all used to express individualistic views and experiences that are best described visually.

–– Michael Katchen

The show includes:

Sally Curcio
Eye Candy from the series, Family Resemblances
Candy Buttons spelling “Eye Candy in braille

Each of Curcio’s pieces deliberately confronts us with an alien obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into visually satisfying pieces that evoke the simplicity and “cleanness” of minimalism, the freshness of op art, and the familiarity of folk art. The shapes are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the work beautifully neat and the materials surprisingly familiar, albeit re-contextualized.

– Review written by JM Wilson III, Ph.D.

Dalia Amara

Dalia Amara’s work uses sculpture and performance to create images that are concerned with the way the female body is objectified, displayed, and controlled in the media. Amara utilizes anthropomorphism and a personal visual language that borrows from horror imagery and commercial photography to create dark humored images that challenge the cultural expectations of performative femininity.

Tom Bogaert

Plaine au Mille Souris (This is not Rwanda) rejects Malthusian theories stating that the 1994 Rwanda genocide was the preordained result of the impersonal forces of poverty and overpopulation. The mice that overpopulate the picture plane are cast from the licorice candy that is distinct to Belgium and acknowledges Europe’s disastrous influence in African affairs.
In 1798 Thomas Malthus declared that “If there are too many people and not enough food, then, certainly, there are going to be problems [...] as nature has a natural way to cut population levels: crime, disease, war, and vice".

– tombogaert.org

Moses Ros

Using recycled material and images with printmaking into a collage, the Reprolláge was created. Reprollage combines recycled materials in unique p rinted collages that blend the New York experience and the artist’s memories of childhood. The artist celebrates New York’s forward-looking spirit of sustainability and commitment to the reuse of valuable resources and relates that spirit into iconic images. Choco is based on a human face with tiger markings fusing the civilized with the savage incorporated into the commercial realm.

– mosesros.com

Julia Justo

My work is a rethinking of the traditional altars I used to see in Argentina while I was growing up. It is a narrative about mortality and desire, domesticity and fantasy. Past and present are intertwined, because issues of spirituality, identity and consumerism are still part of our society.

– juliajusto.com

Christina Marsh

I use art as a medium to illustrate my struggle with physical and emotional bonds. Between the polarities of black and white, positive and negative exists a neutral area. My works are about deciphering that gray. The struggle for identity through the imaging of black is a prevalent conversation in the art world and beyond, as well as is the use of white, not just as a color, but also a symbol. My experience is that nothing is purely black or white; everything exists as interpretation and perspective.

- Christina Marsh