Ken + Julia Yonetani - Still Life: The Food Bowl

Ken and Julia Yonetani’s latest exhibition, ‘Still life: the food bowl’ is just as exquisite and ecologically pressing as their previous works. The result of a nine month residency in Mildura, the sculptures in this exhibition are made entirely of salt from the Murray River. The exhibition comprises of three Greco-Romanesque plinths (made of salt) on which small salt sculptures of fruit, vegies and lobster rest; a large table displaying a salt-sculpted feast of much of the same produce, five empty frames which represent the five senses, and a large salt and metal chandelier suspended just inside the front display window. Currently showing at the Artereal in Rozelle, the website describes the exhibition as such:

Along the Murray-Darling basin, known as Australia's 'food bowl' because it produces up to ninety per cent of Australia's fresh food, 550,000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the ground every year to try and stem the increasing rise of highly saline ground-water.

Still Life: The Food Bowl is made from this groundwater salt. It draws on the still life genre as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produe to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. (http://www.artereal.com.au)

Much like the sugar of Yonetani’s monumental ‘Barrier reef’, here the salt is a metaphor for the excess and gluttony that has come to characterise human consumption throughout history, through to the present day. As Artereal’s website states, salt acts as ‘a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also induces the death of ecosystems and the collapse of empires.’ Indeed, the way in which the salt sets to become sculptures, hard like stone, is demonstrative of what happens to an environment largely neglected and sacrificed to fulfil the wants of human desire. It was this environment that the Yonetanis witnessed first-hand at Mildura, and it is the one they now urge us to consider.

Within the installation is a dialectic of abundance and scarcity indicative of the human condition. While there is a lavish array of food, moulded from the produce of the ‘food bowl’, it is unmalleable and bland – lacking colour, material variety, and flavour. The empty frames which adorn the gallery walls – adjacent to the still life which sits virtually still, solid on a table in the middle – emphasizes the ironic beauty of this installation. The frames contain nothing, but are supposed to represent the five senses, while the subject matter of still life sits before them, drained of their visual vibrancy, uncontained within the frames and unable to stimulate the senses. The imposing chandelier, illuminated by both artificial and natural light, intricately composed yet hollow in the middle, reinforces this tension and accentuates the theme of excess.

The exhibition is brilliant, permeated by the quiet, reflective message that has come to characterise the Yonetanis’ works; eerie in its silence, yet persistent in its call to action. It is on show until 2 July. [Image from http://arterealgalleryblog.blogspot.com]