Art & Ecology
EXPLORING THE ORIGIN OF FOOD THROUGH ART by Elizabeth Shores
Trans-species Repast, (2014) Performance at Wignall Museum of Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA, with Dena, the chicken. Recycled cardboard tables, ceramic bowls, video, watermelon. Photo credit: Wignall Museum of Art. With thanks to Joe Ben, Leigh Jerrard, and Kylie Heikkila.
This year I inherited a garden. It was my first attempt, as an artist, to grow my own food. Like many people, my food experiences have been tied to industrial agriculture. I hoped that growing plants from seed and harvesting them would change my connection to food. However, it wasn’t until I met and spoke with University of New Mexico (UNM) faculty members in the Art & Ecology Department and the Land Arts of the American West program that I began to understand what it meant to be connected to food and the land. “Food is the most concrete product of the landscape that we use to communicate with the landscape,” said artist and UNM professor Catherine Page Harris as she recounted for me the inspirations behind one of her latest artworks, Trans-Species Repast. In this work, exploring
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edible Santa Fe | LATE WINTER 2015
hierarchy and agency, Harris designed a series of performative dinner dates with nonhuman animal collaborators. The meals were videotaped and included in a group exhibition titled Home ECOnomics: Communal Housekeeping for the Twentieth Century, curated by artist Danielle Giudici Wallis at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California. As an artist and a landscape architect, Harris strives to incorporate habitat design into her work, pointing to psychological research that shows nonhuman animals are capable of complex thought patterns and emotional responses. During the exhibition opening, Harris and Dena, a chicken, shared a locally grown watermelon from handmade ceramic bowls while sit-