To Serve Man is a Cookbook peers into the pleasures and excesses of contemporary food culture in relation to ones' body. The work examines the communal performances of form, the smacking poesy of lips, the creamy comedy of slick tongues, the playful pulls and squishes of mouths dripping and salivating words, the joyful spill-overs of conversations and connections.
Food(ie) culture in all its sexy vigour may unite us in pleasure to be sure, but it is the slippery mush of our bodies that truly connects us. Not the long table, not the artisanal sausage, not the handmade ice cream,nor the designer juicer. (The language surrounding the trend of artisanal food culture often eerily parallels that of earnest contemporary art-speak : rhetoric of community and of community based values, of organic process, of cultural service, of broad yet local cultural inclusions and brandings, of green interventions, and ultimately of transcendent social purposefulness.)
I imagine this show as through a smeared prism of flesh. On the surface, this show may appear as a sneering play against excessive consumption, against 'consumer culture.' But how does one elude this consumer culture? It is not something one merely avoids or navigates around. Culture-as-traffic-accident. Rather, one takes it all in as one may food; consumer data cascading in and out of ones' body. This lyrical model of consumption is a tract, a body. One takes it all in and yet it all must leave. Food to body to waste. This show looks to examine not only what we consume but how this consumption moves through our bodies and ultimately, how this movement may connect us as individuals and as larger communities, however grotesque, however beautiful.
Gallerywest, Toronto