EAT ME
(Emerging Artists on Consumption)
Reception
Eat Me in the Press
Has consumer culture completely subsumed Americans' lives? Can this consumption sustain us in any lasting way, or is it the empty cycle of binge and purge that the rest of the world often assumes it to be? We really do love to binge eat, binge drink, binge on sex and pornography, binge on cars and vacations, shop for religion, shop for happiness and a sense of belonging.
Five young artists grapple with these ideas in "Eat Me," an exhibition that explores ideas of consumption utilizing a variety of materials.The result is a visual feast that examines advertising, sex, food and politics.
A sense of humor and cynicism are integral to the way Susannah Bettag's paintings are presented and the questions they ask. Tiny appliances, fridges and kettles, pools and fountains of symbols of traditional female domesticity spill themselves across the surfaces of many of Bettag's recent paintings. Bettag's painted lunch bags toy with tension and transgression, each one painted with a graphic image and a phrase or two like, "Inside, thoughts of sex, thoughts of shopping to be done."
Kate Eric, a young couple working together, have recently championed the cause of the conformist. In establishing the correlation between homogeneity and happiness they create ornately detailed acrylic paintings that are filled with tension and humor, both bleak and grotesque, richly colorful and strangely elegant.
Lard of the Wings, MeccaDonalds, Holyburton: These are the glorious abominations that have sprung from the mind of San Francisco based artist Kenneth Hung. Hung's wickedly irreverent art revolves around complex, incisive and abrupt parody, as if the world's most clever political cartoons shattered and collapsed around his chosen theme. Mao Ze Dong as the Virgin Mary, Tony Blair as the Hamburgler – all make use of scathing and hysterical artistic shorthand, imagery that has burned itself onto the global consciousness through omnipresent newscasts. The public's main resource to experience Hung's multimedia art is his website, 60x1s.com. Primarily through this site, and in only five year's time, he has become a global celebrity with exhibits in over twenty countries. A computer will be on display inviting visitors to interact with Hung's pop-culture Mary Shelley creations. A limited number of prints will be available for sale.
Trek Kelly surveys and forecasts our social and political climate with hysterical humor, highlighting the abuses and excess of political power and celebrity – case in point, his Gerber brand condoms, or his altered photo of an anti-insurgent soldier on the streets of Baghdad, decked out in red Target Store fatigues. Kelly's art responds instantly to celebrity behavior that is lionized in the press, and he calls all of this "Super-Pop" or "RealArt" in reference to the mania surrounding reality television.
Ema Harris-Sintamarian pins down the theme of consumption in the form of vastly complex drawings, often stretching across massive expanses of paper. These incorporate saccharine figures appropriated from popular advertising and meandering weavings of vague and maniacally detailed architectural shapes, resembling a stretched web of denuded buildings and compacted satellites. With a sense of irony and humor present in much of "Eat Me," the Romanian native's drawings draw attention to both the pace and overwhelming entanglements of frenetic unrelenting consumption. Harris-Sintamarian holds an MFA from the University of Delaware and San José State University.
-Artwork by Susannah Bettag & Ema Harris-Sintamarian featured on cover and inside San Francisco Bay Guardian (March 1-7, 2006)
-Artwork by Susannah Bettag & Ema Harris-Sintamarian featured in Night & Day section of SF Weekly (March 1-7, 2006)
-Daily Candy "Weekend Guide" (March 2, 2006)
-Interview with Wendi Norris and artist, Trek Thunder Kelly on Comcast Cable, "Inside City Limits"
-PaperCity "Blackbook" (March 2006)
About Eat Me-Artwork by Susannah Bettag & Ema Harris-Sintamarian featured in Night & Day section of SF Weekly (March 1-7, 2006)
-Daily Candy "Weekend Guide" (March 2, 2006)
-Interview with Wendi Norris and artist, Trek Thunder Kelly on Comcast Cable, "Inside City Limits"
-PaperCity "Blackbook" (March 2006)
Has consumer culture completely subsumed Americans' lives? Can this consumption sustain us in any lasting way, or is it the empty cycle of binge and purge that the rest of the world often assumes it to be? We really do love to binge eat, binge drink, binge on sex and pornography, binge on cars and vacations, shop for religion, shop for happiness and a sense of belonging.
Five young artists grapple with these ideas in "Eat Me," an exhibition that explores ideas of consumption utilizing a variety of materials.The result is a visual feast that examines advertising, sex, food and politics.
A sense of humor and cynicism are integral to the way Susannah Bettag's paintings are presented and the questions they ask. Tiny appliances, fridges and kettles, pools and fountains of symbols of traditional female domesticity spill themselves across the surfaces of many of Bettag's recent paintings. Bettag's painted lunch bags toy with tension and transgression, each one painted with a graphic image and a phrase or two like, "Inside, thoughts of sex, thoughts of shopping to be done."
Kate Eric, a young couple working together, have recently championed the cause of the conformist. In establishing the correlation between homogeneity and happiness they create ornately detailed acrylic paintings that are filled with tension and humor, both bleak and grotesque, richly colorful and strangely elegant.
Lard of the Wings, MeccaDonalds, Holyburton: These are the glorious abominations that have sprung from the mind of San Francisco based artist Kenneth Hung. Hung's wickedly irreverent art revolves around complex, incisive and abrupt parody, as if the world's most clever political cartoons shattered and collapsed around his chosen theme. Mao Ze Dong as the Virgin Mary, Tony Blair as the Hamburgler – all make use of scathing and hysterical artistic shorthand, imagery that has burned itself onto the global consciousness through omnipresent newscasts. The public's main resource to experience Hung's multimedia art is his website, 60x1s.com. Primarily through this site, and in only five year's time, he has become a global celebrity with exhibits in over twenty countries. A computer will be on display inviting visitors to interact with Hung's pop-culture Mary Shelley creations. A limited number of prints will be available for sale.
Trek Kelly surveys and forecasts our social and political climate with hysterical humor, highlighting the abuses and excess of political power and celebrity – case in point, his Gerber brand condoms, or his altered photo of an anti-insurgent soldier on the streets of Baghdad, decked out in red Target Store fatigues. Kelly's art responds instantly to celebrity behavior that is lionized in the press, and he calls all of this "Super-Pop" or "RealArt" in reference to the mania surrounding reality television.
Ema Harris-Sintamarian pins down the theme of consumption in the form of vastly complex drawings, often stretching across massive expanses of paper. These incorporate saccharine figures appropriated from popular advertising and meandering weavings of vague and maniacally detailed architectural shapes, resembling a stretched web of denuded buildings and compacted satellites. With a sense of irony and humor present in much of "Eat Me," the Romanian native's drawings draw attention to both the pace and overwhelming entanglements of frenetic unrelenting consumption. Harris-Sintamarian holds an MFA from the University of Delaware and San José State University.
