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Art Art & Books

Eat up this show

EAT THE FOOD! at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen West), to October 28. 416-395-0067. Rating: NNNN


In this season of thanks for the harvest and full bellies, MOCCA curator Camilla Singh gives artists a chance to stir the pot with amusing, insightful and disturbing takes on food issues.

Corinna Schnitt ‘s dreamlike video Once Upon A Time, in which animals placidly destroy a nice apartment, recalls the children’s story about a man with a crowded home who’s advised to take in more and more farm animals.

The Food Jammers , three local dudes with a show on the Food Network, bring entertaining video clips of wacky inventions like the bowling ball that makes ice cream as you bowl and the bamboo steamer UN for dumplings.

Mexico’s Máximo González effectively sends up ethnic and culinary stereotypes with his Che Guevara motorcycle jacket and military gear made entirely of blackened dried chillies. Shelly Rahme , who interprets geological formations in homely materials, contributes Greasy Strata, a slice of shortening topped with potato chips that’s at once evocative and repulsive.

The 90-minute Our Daily Bread, by Austrian Nikolaus Geyrhalter , takes a fascinating, sometimes horrifying narration-free trip through industrial food production.

The film inevitably moves up the food chain from mechanized planting and harvesting to scenes of pig farming and cattle slaughter that are important to see but hard to stomach.

L.A.-based photographer Jill Greenberg ‘s does commercial work for the film industry and knows how to give a slightly sickening Hollywood sheen to her large head shots of young children crying.

It’s not clear what they have to do with food – the kids look well fed is Greenberg commenting on those “for just pennies a day…” charity pitches? – but like wailing children themselves, the photos, in all their glossy wrongness, are hard to ignore.

Throw these strong-flavoured works and a few others into the pot and you have a nourishing stew of a show.

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