"Bountiful" is now exhibiting at Future Tenant and a complimentary sustainable food panel and tasting event,"Bountiful Harvest" will be happening on November 22nd from 3 to 5 pm. Dive deeper into what food means to us, Future Tenant continues to present artist interviews and take a glimpse of what inspired the artists to create work such as the ones showing in "Bountiful". This interview is conducted by Visual Programming Manager Kate Lin with Teréz Iacovino.
Could you give us a brief introduction of who you are and how you became an artist?
Teréz: I’m an artist and educator currently based in Minneapolis. Over the years I've worked as a book preservationist, papermaker, gallery installation coordinator, and live-in studio intern. As far as how I became an artist, I’m someone who has always been drawn to process, problem solving, and making things with my hands. For me, art encompassed all of this with an added creative freedom.
Growing up in apartments with just my mom, I acted as the family "handyman," creating hack fixes for things like a leaky air conditioner by funneling water into a bucket, or tying our Christmas tree to the window sill one year with shoelaces because it kept falling down. I'm starting to find that even at a young age I was embracing the role of the "non-expert," which I feel has carried over into my multimodal approach to making. Rather than viewing non-expertise as a weakness, I find strength in the fluidity that it provides and strive to generate constant questioning and curiosity, rather than solely prescribing answers.
Please give us a short description of concept to your showing pieces.
Teréz: Dinner for One plays with the idea of the TV dinner as an industrial edition - essentially a mass produced multiple (in this case a meal) that strives to be identical to all other meals of its same make. What fascinates me about industrial agriculture and corporate food culture is exerting this control over nature and taste to be able to create a meal that is exactly the same no matter if you microwave it in Minneapolis or Morocco.
Can you explain how the interactive installation works? What did you put on the screen print and how does it react to the temperature change in the toaster oven?
Teréz: Dinner for One invites the viewer to “cook” the art, which are screen printed half tone images of scanned TV dinners. They are printed using a concoction of corn syrup and cornstarch that when heated caramelizes on the paper and creates various tonalities of brown. The science behind the project was inspired by invisible ink experiments I used to do as a kid with lemon juice on paper. You then hold the paper back and forth over a flame until the message starts to decode from the lemon juice reacting with the heat.
You mentioned that your work focuses on the intersections of nature and technology. Can you tell us a little more about how you apply technology in your other work and your thoughts on how art and technology relate to each other?
Teréz: More recent works and collaborations use technologies like hydroponics - a soil-less or dirt-less method of growing food - in an effort to create sculptures and objects for the home that grow edibles. In many ways I’m employing very low fi and ancient technologies in my work, since hydroponics have been around for centuries. They're really nothing new. And of course "invisible ink" is nothing novel, but I still find magic in it. And in terms of how art and technology relate to each other, I see them as both being about communication. Each challenges how we think about and see the world. They both possess a motive to question, to explore, to reimagine, and they're always constantly evolving. What we now refer to as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary art carries with it the lineage of systems and cybernetic art, bio and transgenic art, all of which are deeply rooted in technology. Technology has given rise to the "postdisciplinary" artist and will continue to complicate the artist’s relationship to a medium.
What is your creative process? How long does it usually take you to complete a project/artwork?
Teréz: When I was in undergrad studying graphic design (which I later left for printmaking) the program motto was “just redo it.” I’m finding more and more that this is a large part of my creative process. Usually I need to play with materials and make several prototypes before completing the final project. I may do a couple different iterations until it get the material to do what I want, which can be highly frustrating. In terms of a time frame I've had individual projects (like Dinner for One) that I’ve completed over a couple of months, but more recent hydroponic collaborations have taken up to a year or more.
How does food in general relate to you on a personal level (and your art)?
Teréz: Growing up I was fortunate enough to have access to wholesome, nutritious food, but I never had any relationship to where my food came from. In 2009, I moved to upstate New York to live and work at the Women's Studio Workshop. Food culture there centered heavily around a daily lunch potluck in which the entire staff partook. It was also an area of New York that had a rich local and organic food movement and it was the first opportunity I ever had to garden. The experience dramatically shaped my current relationship with food and just instilled an awareness of the politics surrounding food that becomes more and more prevalent throughout the United States as the slow food movement gains momentum.
My art practice becomes another vehicle from which to question and critique my own (and our country's) relationship with food. With the explosion of social practice, so many contemporary artists are working with food. It is something that everyone has some form of relationship with, no matter where you come from. For me, that makes it a powerful subject to unpack.
Do you admire any other artists?
Teréz: Of course! The amount of talented artists that we have access to via the web is overwhelming, so I've been working on making these massive Google Doc indexes for myself of artists who inspired me. Lately, I've been looking at the mycology research and prototyping of Phillip Ross, as a challenge to myself on how to rethink the way in which I use materials. Phoebe Washburn's massive, seemingly haphazard installations always provide a reminder for how amazing structures can be made from the mundane. Most recently I've been thinking about how to bring my foundational roots in printmaking back into my practice as a way to give my process of diagramming and writing a new life. I've been looking at the prints of Marnix Evereart and the drawings of Jorinde Voight as inspiration for how to illustrate the unseen, how to map familiar and everyday moments, and how to breakdown various systems, no matter how large or small.
Are you working on any new projects at the moment? And where can we follow your work? (Blog, website, twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Teréz: Yes, primarily collaborative versus solo endeavors at the moment. I collaborate with an artist/architect team of two other women (Laura Bigger and Artemis Ettsen) known as Crescent Collective. We recently finished a project called The Hydroponic Table in which we designed a dining table that can produce edibles using very low tech hydroponic growing. Find out more at Crescent Collective's website.
How did you know about Future Tenant?
Teréz: I was first introduced to Future Tenant back in 2011 when Future Tenant Vet, Katy Peace, gave me the opportunity to do a window installation of a project that was just winding down called Posted Public. I’ve traveled to Pittsburgh quite a few times since then and always keep my ear to the ground for what's happening at Future Tenant.