“Still life: the food bowl” by Julia Yonetani, Ken Yonetani


  • ©, ,

    • Image from kenandjuliayonetani.com

Title:


    Still life: the food bowl

Artist(s) and People Involved:


Symposium:


Venue(s):


Artist Statement:


    Ken + Julia Yonetani showed their large scale salt installation Still Life: The Food Bowl, a work which emerged in 2011 from a Synapse Residency organized and sponsored by Mildura Palimpsest. This work is made with Murray River Salt.

    Still Life: The Food Bowl is made from this groundwater salt. It draws on still life as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produce to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. The still life themes of consumption, luxury, vanity and mortality are reenacted, now entirely from salt. The stark white salt works bring us back to the environmental cost of agricultural production and link up with historical associations of salt—as a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also induces the death of ecosystems and the collapse of empires. Salt becomes a metaphor for the rise and fall of civilisations throughout history, and the issues of environmental decline, climate change, and food security that face us on a global scale today.  Source: kenandjuliayonetani.com/still_life.html

Category: