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Molly Balcom Raleigh

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I was so hungry

I was so hungry
I was so hungry

Meat, cheese, dried fruit, chocolate, bread, crackers, wine. Part of Food Fight group show at Altered Esthetics, November 2011.

I was so hungry
I was so hungry

Meat, cheese, dried fruit, chocolate, bread, crackers, wine. Part of Food Fight group show at Altered Esthetics, November 2011.

I was so hungry
I was so hungry

Meat, cheese, dried fruit, chocolate, bread, crackers, wine. Part of Food Fight group show at Altered Esthetics, November 2011.

Crowd at Food Fight Opening Reception, November 2011
Crowd at Food Fight Opening Reception, November 2011

Audiences who attended the opening of this group show were invited to partake of the edible mosaic I created as part of I was so hungry. As they ate the mosaic a photograph of an industrial farmscape was revealed below the food.

I was so hungry | Media List


Statement


I was so hungry is a participatory performance installation that uses the snacks often present at art openings to elicit dialogue with the audience about the conflicted relationship between American cultural foodways and food production, and personal food choices. In I was so hungry, gallery-goers are presented with a table full of pixel-bites of the typical art opening snacks: cheese, fruit, bread, etc., arranged as a mosaic image of my body. As the audience eats away the mosaic in food, the image of an industrial farmscape emerges from below the food; a slow fade over the course of the opening party from a human figure created in and by food to a photograph of the landscape that created this food, a landscape that bears its own distinctive appearance shaped by large-scale American agricultural techniques.







The fade from one image to the next, and the hands that entered the frame and removed the food, were captured in video. The resulting footage was sped up and edited into a 3-5 minute video that played on loop for the remainder of Food Fight, a group show at Altered Esthetics in November 2011.