Looks Like Grit, Smells Like Chocolate
In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan characterizes the American processed food industry as “The triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution”.
Upon arriving in Chicago in 2007, I considered this line as I walked the streets of my Fulton Market 'hood: Here raw pork became smoked sausage; over there, infinite Chicken McNuggets were turned out 24/7.
I was surrounded by raw material-- trucked and trained in, broken down into its smallest components, re-constituted, transmogrified, rebuilt, and transformed--into shiny, packaged and consumable, cultural commodity.
Chicago seemed a complex and perfect nexus of transitivity: Rich as both metaphor for the provisionality of painting and an experience of the urban sublime.
This work is experiential: about transition from one place to another, cultural juxtaposition, and the collision between raw and refined, familiar and unknowable material.
