Happy Wednesday. Add a little spice to your day with musings from Jai.

I just lucky enough to attend the opening reception at the Concord Art Association for the exhibit, Consuming Passion: Food as a Metaphor, where my friend Elizabeth Kostojohns’ work was part of the exhibit. In a word, amazing…! Even I was artistically talented which I am not - this exhibit was mind blowing with talent.

The Concord Art Association, located in historic Concord, 
has been a home to the visual arts since 1917 when it was founded by
American impressionist painter, Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts.

The current exhibit is being shown on the Main Gallery from Oct. 18 to Nov. 18, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m., and Closed on Mondays . Admission and free.

It's all about food - essential to life, and more than its physical parts; a reflection of  shared human experience. For artists, food is a copious source of visual and symbolic inspiration.  And that was apparent by looking at the work.

In Consuming Passion, 13 artists use food imagery with a variety of intentions: to provide a peek into our domestic settings and to provoke questions about what is really happening during an everyday moment, to express concerns about threats to our environment, to celebrate the sumptuousness of our organic riches, to alert us to the delicacy and the fertility of symbolic foods, to comment on human consumption, and to employ food to illustrate and to evoke human emotion.

The artists (Niels Burger, David Frazer, Judith Klausner, Elizabeth Kostojohn, Hannah, Perrine Mode, Judith Motzkin, Joyce Utting Schutter, Tara Sellios, Elizabeth Slayton, Judith Solomon, Jessica Straus, Kathleen Volp , Sue Yang)  employ a variety of media – including edible materials themselves – to explore food as a metaphor for human relationships and society’s challenges, and sometimes as a critique of contemporary culture.

Not only was I amazed by my friends amazing drawings, but by some of the other work as well. One artist sewed (yup, sewed) an egg onto a piece of toast. This same artist used Chex cereal to look like needlepoint. Another artist carved cameos into the cream of Oreo cookies..one whittles wood into cobs of corn. There was mixed media, digital art, painting.

I am not an art critic and probably not doing this justice ... do yourself a favor and get to the museum. You won’t be disappointed.

37 Lexington Road, Concord MA 01742 | 978-369-2578