dinner pARTy 

My art education and culinary education began in early childhood.  Surrounded by artists and spending many hours in art museums as a child, before I even began to study art using conventional media, I was making art with anything I could get my hands on including food coloring and dryer lint and would spend time in museums looking at brush strokes and blending of colors and individual chisel marks.  My culinary education began sitting on the kitchen counter under the spice cabinet. My mother, a chef who never worked professionally other than some catering before her second marriage, was fluent in the language of food and it was the primary language in which she educated me. The fluency she had with flavor and the technical skills required to prepare exquisite food she shared with me.  Making art and preparing food are the two actions most central to my life.

My work, including the photographs in the show and the food, is about mixing and juxtaposing elements in order to take them out of context and engage with them in subtly or radically different ways.  Essential is the engagement.. Art 4 pARTy comes out of my hope that art is communication and my belief that sitting down at a table with others is a pathway to connection and engaging with one another.   By buying art to get food, the sterile box which divides artist from collector is transgressed. Artist/chef and diner/collector become conspirators in breaking down the boundaries established at the kitchen door and the threshold of the gallery.

Welcome to my dinner table