Canning Spectrums
Canning Spectrums (2009 to 2016) are a series of canned-food color spectrum sculptures that started in 2009 as part of an exhibition called Harvest, at the Bridge Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. More recent iterations of the work are collaborations with Kate Daughdrill, emerging as part of our ongoing creative discourse around shared experiences at Burnside Farm, Daughdrill’s urban farm in Detroit.
In 2009, I co-founded C’ville Foodscapes, a worker-owned cooperative edible landscaping business that helped people grow food in and around Charlottesville. Around that time, I discovered a passion for home-fermentation and other harvest preservation techniques, activities that I learned from my mother and grandmother. Interested in how my queer, cis-male identity might be in conversation with the generations of women (in my family) who had done this work before me, I began to make color spectrums out of the produce from my garden and other gardens I helped create and maintain. Each spectrum serves as an edible homage to my family history, and also as a particular marker of time and place. The pieces vary in size and format, each one becoming a specific collaboration with other gardeners, home-canners, display spaces, and the land.
From 2012 to 2016, the sculptures became an annual high-summer project with Kate Daughdrill at Burnside Farm. Together, Kate and I preserved the harvest, building up a store of winter sustenance. The jars on these canning shelves contained vegetables and fruit that were grown on Burnside, traded with neighbors, or purchased from farmers at Detroit’s Eastern Market. The spectrums grew to include medicinal tinctures created with plants that were foraged from the alleys around the farm and purchased from a neighborhood herbalist. These functional pieces showcase the beauty, stored energy, and bounty of Burnside Farm.
Image credits: LVL3 Gallery, Jason Kachadourian, and Jeremy Taylor
Select Exhibitions:
Listening Spirit: 5 Years at Burnside, (collaboration with Kate Daughdrill), Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, 2016
From Here To There, (collaboration with Kate Daughdrill), MOCAD, Detroit, 2015
Hang Ten Heat Wave, The Bakery, Brooklyn, 2014
Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art, (collaboration with Kate Daughdrill), Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, ON, 2014
Food, Art, & Community, (collaboration with Kate Daughdrill), New City Arts Gallery, Charlottesville, 2014
Infinite Jamz, (collaboration with Kate Daughdrill), LVL3 Gallery, Chicago,2012
CHEER ON, The Garage, Charlottesville, 2010
Harvest, The Bridge Gallery, Charlottesville, 2009