The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Food conveys myriad ideas in group show ‘Gut Feelings’

- By Felicia Feaster For the AJC “Gut Feelings”

We feel a lot through our guts: hunger, satisfacti­on, sadness, intuition. The Zuckerman Museum of Art’s group show “Gut Feelings” is centered on the multifold properties of our gut and how it guides us, both literally and figurative­ly.

Appetite, of a ravenous sort, is front and center in the Marilyn Minter video “Green Pink Caviar,” which features a ravenous, roving mouth pulsating like a sea creature devouring an array of substances in frightenin­g close-up. Gross, lewd and audacious, the video makes no bones about the power of appetite.

Food is also central in the artful tablescape created by Atlanta-based artist Michi Meko. The artist’s atmospheri­c dining table, set up in the gallery space, is a symbolic, ad hoc supper indebted to Southern history and African-American experience. Meko’s ornate, Gothic dinner table is festooned with cotton bolls and dried okra stems and seeds, testifying to the influence of slaves and African foodways on our own Southern tables. Food is loaded with history and with meaning in such instances. It’s the way we connect, to each other and to the past.

But hunger also takes on more metaphoric­al tones in “Gut Feelings,” expressing an array of other states of mind, from sexual desire to anarchical rage.

Curated by Sarah Higgins, “Gut Feelings”’s most consistent and powerful theme is how interconne­cted food and food preparatio­n can be with expressing both female agency and female frustratio­n. Top-heavy with powerhouse female artists, “Gut Feelings” is at its best when examining how food and female desire intersect.

In the darkly comic 1975 video from feminist art pioneer Martha Rosler, “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” the artist is shown performing an A-B-C alphabet rundown of kitchen implements from apron and bowl to chopper and dish. As the demonstrat­ion of these various tools of domesticit­y continues, the artist’s gestures become increasing­ly violent, her knives and ice picks suddenly wielded with furious intensity, plunged like a killer’s murder weapon into the air. The video conveys the suppressed Through May 7. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. TuesdaysSa­turdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. Free admission. Zuckerman Museum of Art, 492 Prillaman Way, Kennesaw. 470-5783223, zuckerman. kennesaw.edu. Bottom line: An array of issues is tackled through the agent of food in this group show. rage of women being forced to express their creativity and life’s purpose in the limited realms of home and hearth, reduced to a domestic appliance themselves.

In a similarly amusing riposte to that kitchen-as-jail theme, “Cooking With the Erotic” by Ilana Harris-Babou, the artist gleefully mocks the convention­s of a TV cooking show, linking creativity in the kitchen with creativity in the artist’s studio. Manipulati­ng margarine and eggs, potatoes and cherry tomatoes like clay or pigment, two women turn their kitchen into a delightful­ly expressive, nutty playground where childlike impulses to squish and squeeze and poke and mess become part of an anarchical creative process.

Taking the act of kitchen creativity to a whole new level, the uproarious, laugh-outloud funny Australian YouTube video series “How to Basic” pretends to offer online cooking instructio­nals, with an unseen chef assembling recipes on-camera.

They begin like so many lifestyle how-tos, with peppy music and a cheery step-bystep of how to make a cake or a cheeseburg­er, but quickly devolve into destructiv­e melees as our increasing­ly unhinged chef tosses eggs, slabs of raw meat, flour, chocolate, food dye and anything else he can get his hands on into a riot of pure, cathartic destructio­n, grunting and wailing and snorting like a madman all the way. Making a crude link between food and its end result, the videos are obsessed with bodily functions but make a hilarious point about how convention­alized and aesthetici­zed food prep instructio­nals can be. Like much of the work in “Gut Feelings,” this video series illustrate­s how we so often hide all of the messiness of life as it is really lived.

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 ?? CONTRIBUTE­D BY THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK ?? A still from Marilyn Minter’s video “Green Pink Caviar” (2009), featured in “Gut Feelings” at Zuckerman Museum of Art.
CONTRIBUTE­D BY THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK A still from Marilyn Minter’s video “Green Pink Caviar” (2009), featured in “Gut Feelings” at Zuckerman Museum of Art.
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 ?? CONTRIBUTE­D BY RUIZ-HEALY ART, SAN ANTONIO ?? Chuck Ramirez’s photo “Seven Day Series: KFC” is part of the Zuckerman Museum of Art exhibition “Gut Feelings.”
CONTRIBUTE­D BY RUIZ-HEALY ART, SAN ANTONIO Chuck Ramirez’s photo “Seven Day Series: KFC” is part of the Zuckerman Museum of Art exhibition “Gut Feelings.”

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