Oct 3, 2009–Sep 6, 2010
Kidspace

Gummi bears, Cheetoes, and JELL-O, but also corn, beets, and peaches, Kidspace's largest group show to date, You Art What You Eat, has visitor's mouths watering as five artists whose primary art material is food have taken over the Kidspace gallery at MASS MoCA. Featuring Chandra Bocci, Luisa Caldwell, Saxton Freymann, Liz Hickok, and Joan Steiner, all artists who capitalize on specific properties of food and its sensory appeal, the exhibition includes sculptures, dioramas, photographs, videos, paintings, and site specific-installations. You Art What You Eat runs through September 6, 2010.

Chandra Bocci from Portland, Oregon, has created a 15 foot-wide installation of the Big Bang, an explosion of candy Gummi bears, worms, and fish that is lit from the center. The piece expresses the sticky nature of the Big Bang theory and at the same time, comments on consumerism. She has also created a Cheetoes and Fruit Loops installation in the windows of the gallery. Bocci builds large-scale installations that explore notions of fantasy, spectacle, and consumer culture.

For his children's book series Saxton Freymann from New York City carves fruits and vegetables to create people and animals. In the series he transforms garden-variety produce into emotive faces and amusing animals enhanced with peppercorn eyes, beet-juice mouths, or corn-kernel teeth. "The colors and forms are so wonderful that they give you everything you need. The characters come out of the vegetable or fruit. I'm just nudging it to something it resembles," explains Freymann a graduate of Williams College, who is the creator How Are You Peeling?; Foods with Moods and Dog Food (both named New York Times Best Illustrated Book); Food for Thought, and Food Play.

Liz Hickok from San Francisco, California is renowned for her views of buildings, particularly San Francisco landmarks, created out of JELL-O. Hickok states, "The gelatinous material evokes uncanny parallels with the geological uncertainties of San Francisco's landscape. While the translucent beauty of the compositions first seduces the viewer, their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts." The exhibition includes five photographs of varying sizes, an actual JELL-O mold, and an amusing video of Jarvis Rockwell's Godzilla destroying JELL-O San Francisco.

Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Luisa Caldwell has found something productive to do with those maddening little labels found on fruits and vegetables. She uses them to form flowers petals and as a base for other collage paintings. The exhibition shows her progression with the labels from simply using them to document her eating habits over a month to the formation of ever more elaborate flower paintings. The exhibit includes a sample of four years of fruit label explorations, as well as two paintings. Caldwell also displays an installation made of candy wrappers. Both choices of materials-labels and candy wrappers-encourage visitors to consider the marketing and classification of food.

Joan Steiner from nearby Claverack, New York, uses a variety of found objects to make intricate dioramas for her renowned Look-Alikes children's book series. Publishers Weekly says: "In this world … nothing is quite what it seems, slices of bread pave a sidewalk; infant pacifiers double as gaslights; pretzels affixed to round crackers become chairs at an old-fashioned soda fountain" The exhibition features four dioramas of cityscapes where a large percentage of the pieces are comprised of food. A photograph used in her books and a video showing how she creates her dioramas are also on view. A self-taught artist Steiner holds a degree in philosophy from Barnard College, and creates her work in her home studio.

The exhibition includes an interactive area entitled "Food for Thought", where visitors can learn more about food consumption, a listening station to hear over 150 food songs, and a reading area with food-related children's books. Kidspace will offer opportunities for the public to create their own sculptures using food during public hours Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 4pm, plus during school holidays.

Kidspace offered an extensive program for school groups from the North Adams Public Schools and North Berkshire School Union. Funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Schools grants, students worked with Luisa Caldwell, Liz Hickok, Chandra Bocci, and Saxton Freymann in school residency programs. An interdisciplinary curriculum guide was presented to the participating teachers and made available on Kidspace's website, massmoca.org/kidspace. North Adams Regional Hospital's REACH program is working with North Adams' second graders on nutrition and will make connections to You Art What You Eat.

You Art What You Eat opened Saturday, October 3, 2009.