Harvest, a new exhibition at Brisbane’s GOMA, takes food from the table and the field to the gallery wall.
What we put on our forks reveals much about who we are. And for the next three months, Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art is placing food squarely centre-frame. Harvest is the first show of its scale to focus on food and related issues, with more than 100 works displayed across the entire ground floor of the gallery. Curator Ellie Buttrose says Harvest will explore the social, political and aesthetic implications of food production, distribution and consumption. “It’s about food, food production and land management practices – and the way these have been represented in art. The way artists render these things says a lot about a view of the world.”
Works gathered for Harvest range from contemporary commissions to 17th-century still lifes. California-based artists Fallen Fruit are creating sumptuous site-specific wallpaper using fossicked, imperfect fruits as a motif. Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno will hang a floating biosphere, Gardens of the Future, in the Long Gallery. “There’ll also be a full replica of a Chinese supermarket embedded in the exhibition,” says Buttrose. “It’s not until you get up really close you realise the packaging is just filled with air.” A 196-page catalogue, essays and recipe book fusing art and food is also on the table, featuring contributions from chefs such as Noma’s René Redzepi, Quay’s Peter Gilmore, and Ryan Squires of Esquire, Brisbane. The exhibition runs in conjunction with a program at GOMA’s Australian Cinémathèque, featuring screenings of classic food movies and documentaries, plus a fortnightly GOMA Talks panel discussion.
Harvest, Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, Qld, 28 June-21 September.
