by Olivia Canny

Just as taste and smell amplify nostalgic contemplation, so too does Jarid del Deo’s Window (2016) a minutely rendered oil painting of a grocery store flyer which hovers over an industrial landscape, that candidly beckons from the entry of Border Patrol. Wild Maine Mussels are $1.49 per pound and a whole Pecan Pie is $6.99! Del Deo’s meticulous attention to detail validates and gives voice to the working class diet. Each work in Flavor Profile boils down to a devotion to the mundane that breeds nostalgic power.

Curator Meg Hahn notes that food has a “universal humanist understanding,” and that the selected artists and their works reflect some of the cultural, historical, and personal nuances in our relationships with food in all of its forms. Disparate ingredients and media unite to make Flavor Profile a rich and meditative experience. The works utilize diversity and specificity — in material and visual detail — to romanticize a given topic beneath the massive umbrella of “food.” It’s all too easy for romanticization to morph into the hyper-sophistication (and near elitism) rampant in foodie culture, but each artist featured in Flavor Profile pays homage to the more humble facets of human devotion to — and need for — food, without disregarding its social and sentimental power.

Two aluminum collages by Kemar Wynter, Bun and Cheese (2018) and Rosemary Ciabatta (2018), abstractify disposable aluminum pans to emphasize the artist’s use of cooking as a means of deepening their understanding of their Jamaican heritage. The works offer a metallic — hence eye-catching — experimentation with texture and pattern through Wynter’s cutting and re-assembling of various types and shapes of cookware. Chewed bubblegum and Necco wafers garnish the tops of Ruby Jackson’s leggy sculptures, Untitled and Candy Tree (2017), which rest low on the floor in opposite corners of the room. There is a striking similarity in the surface qualities of Jackson’s candy embellishments and the ceramic forms that wear them—glossy bubblegum poses as a generously glazed appendage to ashy ceramic stalks, and dry Necco wafers, nailed through their centers and stacked atop a wedge of foam, resemble tiny saucers of bisqued clay. An extended observation enhances the experience of Jackson’s work just as it does for Dustin Metz’s Communal Night Studio (2015), a rendering of a stem of grapes and a True Value bag in two different shades of black oil paint, requiring the viewer to draw very close to the canvas for long enough to let their eyes adjust to the subtleties on its surface.

Just beyond the threshold of Border Patrol’s middle room is B. Quinn’s nine-page text-based work, 116 Actions in 24 Hours with a Purple Cabbage in Johnson, Vermont (2018). From the first few items, there is a comical and unsettlingly familiar quality to Quinn’s anthropomorphization of the cabbage: “5. I set you on top of the paper towel dispenser to take your photo, but now somehow my phone memory is full.” The dynamics of the narrator’s relationship with the cabbage offer introspection into how value and turbulence function within interpersonal relationships. Quinn shifts reference of the cabbage from “you” to “the cabbage” frequently, places it in the street to watch it get run over several times, buys a new cabbage as a replacement, totes that cabbage all around town, throws it at a garden gnome, and later patches it up with a bandaid. “91. Get up and walk, set cabbage down on top of fire hydrant that is close to three feet tall. You almost fall, but I catch you.” The organization and attention to detail mirrors a grocery list or a recipe for deconstructing one’s relationship to an other, be it tangible and edible, or projected and aggrandized. Across the hall from the text display, Quinn presents a precursor to the list, Purple Cabbage (2017), a series of graphite rubbings of a cabbage that mirror the variability in the artist’s sentiments as communicated in her writing.

Border Patrol’s back room was once a dentist’s examination space, complete with a decommissioned sink and counter that are now home to a lavish allusion to sugar — Cat Quattrociocchi’s Ode to Cakes (2017–18), five stacks of concrete disks topped with congealed liquids like gelatin, wax, urethane, and coconut oil that spill down their sides, directly onto the white laminate countertop. Quattrociocchi compares the chemistry of concrete mixtures to that of cake batter, and garnishes the work with both edible and inedible materials, including powdered orange peel and circuit board fragments. This cohesion of the industrial with the elaborate and decorative serves as a sort of mutual validation — working class material and labor share a silver platter with artisan desserts.

The surrounding wall space presents a striking juxtaposition through Metz’s dark and elusive Classical Night Studio (2015), a black-on-lighter-black oil painting of a bushel of grapes interspersed with specks of cigarette-ember orange, and Wynter’s seven-foot tall Orecchiette with Sausage and Corn (2017), a vibrant abstraction of repeating colors, shapes, and textures displayed through the artist’s application of graphite and oil pastel to a polyester sheet. This experimentation with materials, surface, and how variability within them can enrich a work’s presentation functions as a poetic parallel to the diverse and sensuous nature of food.

Hahn and others collaborated to release two publications to supplement Flavor Profile: The Flavor Profile Cookbook is an edition of 65 printed on a Risograph by Wing Club Press, and features an essay by Hahn along with recipes submitted by each of the artists. Jackson also happens to be an articulate cake decorator and organized photographs of her works into a zine of 25 editions titled a piece of, cakes, alongside poems by Emma Post.

Flavor Profile offers a thoroughly multidisciplinary reflection on food and all of its facets. A large part of Border Patrol’s mission is to explore the relationship between contemporary art and corporate aesthetics; Flavor Profile seems to subvert the latter, opposing the industrialization of food by emphasizing the meticulous and the sentimental.

 

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Flavor Profile, curated by Meg Hahn, features work by Jarid del Deo (ME), Ruby Jackson (NJ), Dustin Metz (CA), Cat Quattrociocchi (ME), B. Quinn (IL), and Kemar Wynter (NY), is on view at Border Patrol through March 23, 2019.

The exhibition will close with a reading of B. Quinn’s 116 Actions in 24 Hours with a Purple Cabbage in Johnson, Vermont at Wild Burritos (581 Congress St, Portland ME) from 3–4pm on Saturday, March 23, 2019, followed by open hours at Border Patrol from 4–6 pm (the last chance to view exhibition) and drinks at The Bearded Lady’s Jewel Box (644 Congress Street) from 6pm onward.

Border Patrol
142 High Street, Suite 309 Portland, ME | info@border-patrol.net
Open by appointment and for events.