Delusion of Eating Exhibition

Shelf Gallery | 57 E. Gay Street, Columbus Ohio
October 7 through November 27, 2010

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 7 | 6 to 9pm
Lecture with the Curators: Thursday November 11 | 7 to 8pm
Delusion of Eating Performances: Friday, November 26 | 9 to 11pm

Gallery Hours: Wednesdays 11 to 1, Thursdays 4 to 7, Saturdays 2 to 4


The Delusion of Eating exhibit presents a national array of artworks that eloquently use the marketed spectacle of eating as the material to explore how capitalism creates an isolating desire.

Works include video, painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and text; all creating a discourse about our lives in the contemporary situation where ideologies about eating are shifting away from science-lab food products and into marketed desires for ‘natural’ ‘slow’ food stuffs, while for the majority of Americans these ‘local’ foods are out of the question due to geography and class. The works approach and present the situation from a range of perspectives: Sarah Bernat’s interactive video questions the link between love, violence, and fried chicken; Dina Sherman’s photography exhibits the psychic power in and
placed on food; and John Malta’s paintings playfully show our lonely addiction to eating out.

Food deserts, omega 6s, food factories, sex-dolls that eat, stomach stapling, metropolitan farming, global outsourcing, comfort food, restaurant culture, family meals, Thanksgiving narratives, productivity, stocks, corporate culture, sex, and love are all exemplary of how a spectacular capitalist economy, incapable of differentiating between profit and good, further perpetuates and requires a delusion of eating.

The exhibition is organized by Vince Chocolate (Eva Ball and Ian Ruffino) and will be accompanied by a text written by the curators and three Ohio writers: Wes Flexner, Matt Morris, and James Payne. The national and international array of artists, all connected to Columbus, are: Sarah Bernat, Harry Crofton, Grant LaValley, John Malta, Nicolas Murer, Dan Olsen, Luke Powers, Janice Schindeler, and Dina Sherman.

About the Artists:
Eva Ball has worked in the Columbus arts community for 10 years. She has curated numerous exhibitions including, Joy Divisions, Time Machine, and 20/20: Twenty Artists Twenty TVs. She has worked with a variety of local arts organizations (BLD, Skylab, Shelf Gallery, OAL, MadLab, OSU Urban Arts Space, and now Glass Axis) in a plethora of capacities, including communications, accessibility, development, operations, and exhibition design, not to mention everything else from building walls to program planning. In 2007, she graduated from The Ohio State University, with a B.F.A., summa cum laude and honors distinction in Sculpture. Her work (visual, music, writing) has been exhibited nationally and in Europe and been discussed in several Columbus publications including the Dispatch, Columbus Alive, 614 Magazine, and Donewaiting. She has received numerous awards including GCAC Franklin County Neighborhood Arts Grant, a nomination for the Ohio Govenor’s Award, the 13th Annual Fergus-Gilmore Scholarship, and two Fellowships to study in Paris and Bucharest. Besides art-making, she has a special interest in post-structuralist theory. She lives with her daughter, Xiu Xiu, in downtown Columbus.

Sarah Bernat is a sound, video, and recording artist known for performing in the horror soundtrack inspired noise group 16 Bitch Pile-up, the stripped down distorted drum and guitar duo Work, and her exploratory solo project Weird Habit. She has toured internationally, curated by Thurston Moore for All Tomorrow’s Parties Nightmare Before Christmas festival in the UK, Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Fest in Brooklyn, NY, and has been widely released on experimental labels including Ecstatic Peace, Troniks (Los Angeles), and American Tapes (Ann Arbor, Michigan). Upcoming projects include a compilation of 100 seconds by 100 artists for French noise label Galerie Pache, and collaborative work with her new industrial noise project Forked and Harry Crofton’s Frankie America. She currently lives in San Francisco and works at the San Francisco Film Society.

Harry Crofton currently lives in sunny San Francisco. Past projects include the N.O.O.W. Artist in Residency (2007-2009) which Crofton funded through the re-appropriation of capital received from California State Unemployment program, and also The Art Olympics, held at BAYAREA51, where participants came from the four corners of the US to compete in a series of events that questioned identity or what it might mean to be a “fan” of art. Crofton is one of the founding members of the Bayview Center of Peer Based Learning, as well as Glue Club, a collaborative project with Jen Kirsten whose latest project culminated in KYO FORTUNE (6000) TELLER LIVE W/ 6000 NEW APPS AND LIVE CDMA DRUG LAB (2010) a social intervention addressing digital media’s limitations of physicality, confronting the way constant linkage to the ceaseless network of the internet, mobile devices, and virtual social networking disrupts human connections. Currently, Crofton has been performing under the alias of Frankie America, part con-skeptual comedian, part politically motivated confrontational chef, and part digital D.N.A. consumer disaster, performing at Conspiracon Brooklyn, NY, Loose Exchange, Miami FL and Post 9/11...Freedumb + Freedoom, San Francisco, CA, to name a few.

Wes Flexner was born on an island off the Gulf of Mexico. He moved to Columbus because his father was a scientist and OSU had the most money. He attempted to join the Nation of Islam when he was 13 but his atheism, blue eyes and lack of melanin thwarted this. So he skateboarded and later wrote graffiti to self-medicate against being lost in the wilderness of North America. Wes is a member of BSA, IOK, PBJ, and 3CB graffiti crews. During college in Louisiana, Wes produced and hosted "The Four Elements of Hip Hop" radio show on KRVS. Upon moving back to Columbus, Wes totaled his car, and nearly murdered his friends. After that he started a graffiti publication called Broken Halo. This linked him up with Paul Loveman. Paul produced and Wes hosted a public access TV show called Omnimix TV that documented Columbus Hip Hop and graffiti. This devolved into a website called Omnimix.com. Wes has freelanced for the Columbus Alive, 614 Magazine, and the Other Paper for the past 6 years. Wes participated in the Blog About It. Be About it. segment for Black Entertainment Television’s True School Hip Hop program, The Deal. Wes also writes for Donewaiting.com, Weedsteeler.com, and is a key organizer in for the Daymon Day Parade that celebrates the memory of people in the music and art community that have died. The parade is in its 5th year. You can find him Mondays and Tuesdays working at Magnolia Thunderpussy Records where he is the Hip Hop buyer.

Matt Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana and a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He makes art and writes. Art meaning installations of fragile objects, installations, drawings, food-based performances, and a lot of unquantifiables. Writing meaning poetry, art criticism, journalism, recipes, and other notes. His writing has appeared in regional and international publications, including Art Papers, Sculpture, City Beat, Alice Blue Review and Aeqai. He has presented exhibitions, lectures, and poetry performances in regional art venues, such as Aisle Gallery, semantics gallery, U · turn Art Space, Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum, the Carnegie Visual + Performing Arts Center, Artworks, Nicholas Gallery, Murmur Gallery and the University of Texas, San Antonio. Morris is a curator with the venerable alternative arts space semantics gallery and a founding member of the gallery U · turn Art Space. He creates works that address, deconstruct, and make peace with forces of abstract thought. They express an interest in the places where concrete ideas fall back into ambiguity and where poetics, aesthetics and nostalgia influence discourse. www.mattmorrisworks.com

Nicolas Murer is a post-doctoral researcher at The Ohio State University. He studies corrosion, more specifically he tries to design or at least use computing tools to model and eventually predict localized corrosion in aluminum alloys. His work has been published once in a journal called Corrosion Science. When he is not working, he's doing whatever is related to his current musical projects (Mulan Serrico, Ultra Detersivo) and his label Stochastic Releases. Noise seems to be the perfect intersection point between music and corrosion. cavatrankil.blogspot.com

Dan Olsen creates collage and video collage that is charming in its colorful crudeness. He is a novice photoshopper, stacking images of different resolution, creating impossible, useless, and crowded landscapes. Deriving ideas from romanticized transience, cryptic messages of the occult, self healing, and magic, the work sits somewhere between sincerity and wry humor. Olsen has exhibited and performed nationwide. His work has been featured at San Francisco International Film Festival, Beautiful Decay Magazine, Fecal Face, and Hamburger Eyes. danzodanzo.com

James Payne is an artist, musician, and writer living at The Monster House in Columbus, Ohio. He curated the exhibition This is a Comic Book with Colleen Grennan and edited Women's Comics Anthology with Anne Elizabeth Moore. His zine with Sara Drake, Arty Party, was recently called "unfunny" by Vice Magazine. Find his blog at www.banalization.blogspot.com

Among her accolades, Janice Schindeler includes Apple Pie Princess of Mount Gretna, Saturday Burger Queen, and Pimento Cheese Goddess. She has cooked on a coleman stove, over open camp fires, on commercial ranges and daily, at home, on a 1930’s chamber range. She has catered dinner parties for 2 and mixed potato salad for 500 in her (very clean) bathtub. She has written for and contributed to numerous publications including, My Table Magazine, The Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, Family Circle, Country Home, Texas Monthly, Veranda, and Australian Patchwork & Quilting. After decades of cooking and writing about food and the Houston food scene, she is considering a change of ingredients from food to fabric.

Ian Ruffino received his BFA from Buffalo State College, and earned his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2001. He is a Senior Lecturer in the art department at The Ohio State University where he teaches courses in printmaking. He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Ohio Arts Council's Dresden (Germany) Residency Exchange, as well as several awards at juried exhibitions. Ruffino's work has been shown at The International Print Center New York, The Print Center, Philadelphia and other venues in Texas, California, Estonia,Macedonia, and Germany, among other places. His writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogs, and is currently the co-editor for the forthcoming regional art magazine Interviews. His field of discourse, relative to art theory, revolves around ideas relating to Modernism and the politics of inter-human relationship design. www.ianruffino.com

Dina Sherman is a genre-defying visual artist living and working in Columbus, Ohio. She recieved her BFA from the Ohio State University in 2007, she has since had the honor of being a visiting artist at Ball State, traveling with ArtrainUSA, and completing a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been seen across the United States, most notably her IMA Gallery project, which has traveled from LA to New York. She is well known not only for her work, but also her overwhelming love of bad puns.