Soylent Green is people, but are people dessert or the main course? An artist with an agenda has turned people into deserts, but wants to do so to sell a message about over consumption of food.
James Ostrer is the artist and is said to have based his images on the result of a “corrupted globalization and increasingly dangerous methods of food production”
He has taken people, or himself, covered them in confections and photographed the results, which are now on display in an art gallery.
As images, they are as bright as the artificial colourings that make up the cheapest end of the confectionery business, and his evident anger at the food industry represented by the sometimes quite explicit imagery chosen.
They are grotesque images, and not entirely pleasant to look at, yet also the underlying political message is somehow lost in the images, which seem to be more the ravings of the hyde park corner soapbox than a considered study of the problems being alluded to.
I am personally not overly happy with the abdication of responsibility that the artist seems to think is going on, where the blame is not the person, but the producer, and that we are all victims of corporations selling unhealthy food.
It’s too easy to blame others for our own failings, our own responsibility to have a single occasional slice of cake, not an entire cake every night.
That message doesn’t come through the layers of confection overlaying the models in these photos.
[Photo deleted because of stupid copyright claim that using a photo of the art displayed in the exhibition in a review of the exhibition is a breach of copyright, which it isn’t, but whatever]
The exhibition is open until the 11th September at Gazelli Art House, Dover Street, W1.
