Michi Meko, Gut Feelings: Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA

28 January - 7 May 2017

Overview

Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself
And so shall starve with feeding.

- Coriolanus, Act IV, scene ii

Gut Feelings brought together a group of contemporary artists whose work looks to food, eating, feeding, and cooking as symbolic representations of exchanged emotion or power. Food as subject matter is both personal and relational. It allows intimate expressions of individual identity to interweave with broader cultural histories. Desire is understood as a complex platform for constructions of selfhood, but also as a framework for communities and social dynamics underlying everything from biopolitics to consumer culture. Hunger is longing from within the body and between people, but it is set apart from desire by the external, concrete material addition of food. The material of food becomes the material of the body. Food matter becomes a site upon which the gratifications or denials of longing may be projected. Gut Feelings presents artworks that inhabit the spaces of hunger, feeding, and eating with a willingness to be as duplicitous, slippery, personal, and communal as their context.