Category Archives: contemporary art

Menu for Mars: Test-drive cooking on the Red Planet

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It started with a polite invitation (“Join the Menu for Mars Supper Club as we pioneer a menu for the Red Planet”) and a series of tomato-red doors leading into plastic-walled chambers. Pierogi’s project space The Boiler has been transformed into a scientific kitchen until June 21st, during which time visitors and artists will test recipes for life on Mars as an extension of organizers Heidi Neilson and Douglas Paulson’s year-long Menu for Mars Supper Club.

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Joshua Liebowitz’s Untag: Prototype for Nutritional Privacy in Barcode-Ready Agar and LEDs

This Flux Factory educational initiative brings together artists, scientists, musicians, and the public to imagine food on Mars. I visited at the opening of Menu for Mars, where spaces encased in plastic featured a central kitchen surrounded by a greenhouse, a food gallery, a photo booth, and an office. The greenhouse displays Marco Castro’s ideas for an inflatable garden and greenhouse with plants that could survive the long journey and harsh climate. Tattfoo Tan has created NEMREs (“New Earth Meal Ready to Eat”) that are not traditionally appetizing—these dehydrated food packs are apparently made from rescued food waste.

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Tattfoo Tan’s Beet Treet

Social engagement brings this interesting theoretical proposition to life, as the space becomes an invitation to action. An ongoing series of programming involving groups as diverse as The Planetary Society of New York City, yogurt-maker Gil Lopez, and musician Will Owens offers guided ways to interact with the space. Anytime, however, visitors can take advantage of a pantry stocked with Mars-feasible ingredients in a variety of dried, powdered, thermostabilized, and dehydrated forms. Meals, including—I believe—those of visitors, will be documented, sample, sealed, and sent as prototypes to NASA to help with their plans to colonize Mars.

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Cooking ingredients in the kitchen

Tomorrow, June 13, at 3 pm, there is a “Jiminy Mac and Cheese” workshop, for those of you adventurous enough to imagine crickets in your Mars macaroni.

It’s a bold, new world.

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One of Heidi Neilson’s five portholes with views onto Mars entitled Big Sky Out There

 

Sara Mejia Kriendler’s The Anthropocene at A.I.R. Gallery

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Installation view of Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition The Anthropocene. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Closing this week, Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition at A.I.R. gallery in DUMBO is a measured, evocative approach to humanity’s place in the world and to waste. Distinguished from the other two shows up at A.I.R. by the careful palette, here shades of ocher, mint, and rose accent neutral whites. Kriendler’s exhibition is titled The Anthropocene, a controversial scientific term for our current age based on our perceived impact on the planet. The artist uses detritus such as plastic packaging, styrofoam, and plaster to create fragmentary leftovers, seemingly crumbling with age. Yet these are clearly contemporary materials. Intimate in scale, the works still evoke grand themes of geologic time.

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Installation view of Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition The Anthropocene. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

In the midst of these environments and altars, female forms appear. The installation In Line for the Shrine features white plaster female figures on a green foam altar backed by slabs of white styrofoam. These leaning white rectangles display fossil-like patterns, slashes, and the occasional whole form, such as that of a bird. The materials are interesting not only for the ecological concerns they recall, but in their fragility. Altars are typically made of durable material. On the other hand, the styrofoams and many plastics we use today are not recyclable and will outlast us. In Line for the Shrine, like other works in the show, plays with scale in that it renders the monumental on a diminutive scale and the human as dwarfed by its surroundings.

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Detail, In Line for the Shrine. Photograph my own.

Kriendler is currently a Fellowship Artist at A.I.R. Gallery. The Anthropocene is up at A.I.R. Gallery through May 31st. More detail shots below.

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Fictional Tours: Keith Wilson’s Cave and Mountain Tour at the Lamar Dodd School of Art

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Your intrepid blogger recently went on an arduous tour, all for the sake of art (and getting to wear a goofy headlamp and hard hat). Actually, this “arduous” tour was around the Lamar Dodd School of Art, where I am a graduate student, and so, to me, a place that has become the most mundane of surroundings. That is exactly the kind of blasé attitude filmmaker and visual artist Keith Wilson wanted to counter on his Cave and Mountain tour. In 2009, Wilson began doing an ongoing interactive performance he calls the Cave and Mountain Tour, and as a Visiting Artist here, he recently led an interpretive tour around the art school.

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Artist Keith Wilson as tour guide

To be clear, the art school does not consist of caves or mountains as I normally think of them. Wilson told our group at the beginning of the tour that there is no universally agreed on definitions of a cave or a mountain, however. And so, having signed a waiver and put on a hard hat and light source, the 15 of us were off, stopping by caves (auditoriums), mountains (flights of stairs), not to mention unknown rain rooms and river gardens. Wilson gave us a tour-guide spiel throughout that toed the line of boring (when the school was founded) and unbelievable (unmarked graves).IMG_6139

The difficulty in judging fact and fiction certainly made the experience interesting, but more than that Wilson took the group through unused areas and gave new (if untrue) meaning to old sites, inspiring an interest in the quotidian. His command to walk in silence at many points forced you to really look and notice surroundings that I, at least, usually am too absorbed in my own thoughts to notice. Highlights of this tour were a “rain room” where continuous pounding of dripping water made a wonderful sound (actually a part of the cooling system) and the attic of the building with all its mechanical apparatus. Despite being half-fictional, this tour gave me a renewed interest in my surroundings–surely something we could all try to incorporate into our lives.