Art exhibit offers food for thought
By Liz Barry on Mar. 06, 2008
By Liz Barry, The Burg
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Christina Marsh dumps a bag of flour into a plastic bucket.
“This doesn’t have to be precise,” Marsh says to an intern at Riverviews Artspace.
Sweater sleeves rolled past her elbows, Marsh grabs a crate of five dozen eggs from the refrigerator and cracks them into the bucket. She adds water, then stirs the goopy mixture with her hands.
“I’m going to wash my arms, and then we’ll get down to business,” Marsh says.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Riverviews, and Marsh, a 28-year-old artist from Colorado Springs, is making 300 pancakes for her upcoming exhibition, “Self-Defined,” which opens on Friday. Her exhibition explores race and identity through photography, mixed media and two installations that revolve around food.
Since Marsh uses food as a medium, she has to work extra hard before the show. Marsh expects to spend between six and eight hours making pancakes.
As the pancakes come off the griddle, Marsh pops them into the oven at 450 degrees Fahrenheit to dry out. Later she will stuff the pancakes into a miniature house made of Aunt Jemima boxes, balsa wood and duct tape.
The installation explores the roots of the ubiquitous Aunt Jemima logo. Though Aunt Jemima’s look has changed over the years, the logo traces its roots to the “mammy” stereotype of black women as cooks and maids.
“We no longer recognize things like Aunt Jemima as being racist,” Marsh says.
To Marsh, the pancakes are about over-consumption. When they are stuffed into the house, it looks like it’s about to explode.
In another installation, Marsh uses milk to illustrate the “one-drop rule,” an infamous racial classification used to discourage interracial marriage and justify segregation. Under the one-drop rule, a person with any amount of African ancestry, however small, was considered black.
Marsh fills 100 glasses of milk with varying amounts of chocolate. Each glass is a labeled with a racial pun or slur associated with being black.
“The milk comes to signify idealized Western conception of whiteness,” Marsh says.
The chocolate adds another dimension.
“There’s an infusion of flavor,” Marsh says with a laugh, “and an infusion of color as well.”
Marsh says her work is autobiographical, drawing from her experiences as a black woman from an upper-middle class suburb of Illinois. She likes to research and base her art on history.
Marsh earned her bachelor of fine arts from the University of Illinois, then went to graduate school for photography. Now she teaches photography, installation and sculpture at Colorado College.
Her work has appeared in galleries throughout the United States. This is her first exhibition in Virginia.
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