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Food and art together in the same frame can’t help but conjure images of two sunny-side-up eggs with a friendly bacon grin. Or, at best, artfully presented tuna sashimi.
Serious art and, say, pocket apple pies, may seem improbable together, but in her master’s thesis show at Clemson’s Lee Art Gallery, Nicole Morita foregoes the art supplies store in favor of Bi-Lo.
The point: oblige viewers to maul over the many facets of food.
“I’ve been really interested in aspects of ritual and labor surrounding food,” she explained. “For example, Thanksgiving and what it means — the cultural connections foods have. My work comes from a desire to share other aspects of food or bring about a different way thinking about food or different appreciation.”
If this was the mission of a less talented artist, it might fail as fluff. Juxtaposing intellectualism with pocket apple pies requires no small amount of dexterity. But in the Morita exhibit, they are successfully woven into visually active installations and sculpture.
Several characteristics of Morita’s work are responsible for the success. Repetition is a recurring theme on several levels. In her “Comfort Pies” installation, the walls of a cube large enough for a person to stand in hold a quilted, visually deceptive pattern consisting of small red and black triangles that compose larger and larger patterns. Six feet off the ground, a shelf holds pocket apple pies.
Despite the comfort the pies represent (not to mention the waft of baked goods) the sensory experience could become overwhelming with an engulfing pattern.
Morita’s thrill lives in rhythms. She finds it in the process of cooking a meal, in food and doesn’t always like it when a sculpture placed in a gallery or an installation is “completed.”
“Sometimes I feel like the work isn’t really finished – the part of the work I enjoy is the labor and repetition, so for me that’s a large part of it and the object isn’t just the end of it,” she said. “Sometimes it goes on and on and on and it’s hard to stop.”
In “Royal Icing Girls,” four rows of silhouetted girls in skirts made from dabs of cake icing stand in four rows. The rows become progressively darker toward the bottom, giving the appearance they are only a segment of a larger pattern. Morita even invited viewers to sample the cake icing on the 9-foot-by-11-foot wide wallpaper.
“I didn’t want it to be quite so serious, but there is a little bit of a disturbing quality,” she explained. “That sense that it’s appealing but at the same time it’s also uncomfortable.”
“Royal Icing Girls” and “Comfort Pie” will not be up at the Lee Gallery show. They are far too large for the space and the four pieces showing are smaller sculptures, but they possess many of the same characteristics.
In keeping with her objective of affecting several senses, viewers are invited to take away a cube with a piece of food inside, which can be eaten.
The one departure from her past work is the role color will play at the Lee show.
“This is my first time consciously trying to work with color on an aesthetic level.
It relates, too, to the different types of foods,” she said.
The work of ceramics student Eileen Powell is also featured in the show. An opening reception is scheduled for April 16 from 7 - 9 p.m. at Clemson University’s Lee Gallery.
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