By: Corinne Speckert, The Spartan Daily
Posted: 12/3/08
Kirkman Amyx, a photography graduate student, holds up his artwork "Food Network," which was created by capturing images of the cable channel every minute for a whole week. The piece will be on displayed Tuesday, December 9th as part of a larger art exhibit called The Politics of Food, which focuses on social, political and environmental impact of food in our world.
The exhibition is put on by students of the school of art and design's museum and gallery operations class, who chose the theme, put the event together and picked the artists.
"At the end of the year the final assignment is to fully create a show," said Nikki Ballere-Callnan, a spatial arts graduate student.
"We take, as a class, what we've learned the entire semester, and then we put it into a show," Ballere-Callnan said. "We all brainstormed and then narrowed it down to what we thought would be interesting for artists and the public."
She said that roughly 20 students responded to the open call, and from there they narrowed it down to 13 through a jury process.
"We chose work that represented the titles that we thought were interesting and reflected political and social issues and currently what's going on in our world," she said.
Ballere-Callnan said the exhibition will be a mixed-media show, showcasing a variety of paintings, photographs and sculptures.
Kirkman Amyx, a photography graduate student whose work was picked for the show, created a multi-image piece comprising layered photographs titled, "The Food Network," which use 7,200 separate captures of the TV channel, captured every minute over a five-day period. Each day's images are overlaid, he said, with the same moment from each day falling in the sample place creating a layered look that builds structure through repetition.
"I am utilizing repetition imagery to emphasize the excesses of media, especially of the 24/7 programming of specialty channels such as The Food Network," Amyx said.
He said one of the reasons he created this piece was to bring forth the main goal of TV programs: selling products.
"As a single channel of its own, the image of the Food Network speaks to the media's commercialization and commodification of food," he said. "While the network does provide entertainment and education, its real purpose is to sell advertising and promote products though the use of guise of cult-like celebrity chefs and food and cooking education."
Presley Martin, a fine arts and ceramics graduate student and curator of the exhibition, said Amyx's piece represented the ideal for which they were looking.
"I think it's relevant to our current life, our current world. Saturated by the media and images, we're always bombarded with images," Martin said. "It's a nice way to consolidate that into a simple format. When you look at the piece you can start to see different patterns that emerge because it's all laid out by time. The horizontal access is every minute and the vertical is every hour."
Amyx's Food Network image is part a larger project. He said he spent a year capturing 69 Comcast cable channels, and was featured at the Herbert Sanders Gallery last month.
"When this call came up, I thought my single image for the Food Network may work for that and show the Food Network as media in general, which utilizes repetition," he said.
"The project, you could look at it like it's making a statement of how the media has created channels for all these niche markets in cable. I think it's absurd that we need a specialty channel such as the Food Network to watch 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
After the exhibition is installed, John Loomis, the director of the school of art and design, will award a "Director's Choice" to the artist whose work best interprets the theme.
Next Tuesday, Dec. 9, there will be a reception in Gallery 3 from 6 to 7:30 p.m., where artists will make appearances and cultural food will be served to go along with the theme of the show.
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