Jodi Rockwell
Toi Sennhauser

Of Sustenance, Secrets and Two Girls

January 4 – 26, 2003

Food brings us together. Families and friends get together and bond over it. Purveyors and consumers clash because of it. Food has united the sculptural visions of Jodi Rockwell and Toi Sennhauser for this exhibition. They chose food as a sculptural medium for many reasons:

• It defines culture and class.

• It has history.

• It has politics.

• It contains symbolic meaning.

• It contains secrets.

• It shapes our bodies.

• It is erotic.

• It is sculpted by desire.

• It is a means of self-expression.

• It can cause death.

• It is life.

In the feast of installations contained here, food acts as an artistic voice as it decays, grows, and continuously changes. Whether the items speak of physical or emotional sustenance, whether they bespeak cultural heritage of personal memory, the show is a product of two women from very different backgrounds.

Rockwell is interested in the behavior of the materials as they interact with each other, creating a metaphor for human relationships, the body, and/or physical geology.

For Sennhauser, the artistic process is not complete until the viewer has interacted with it, thereby bringing a necessary layer of meaning to pieces that propose mouth-to-mind psychological queries and the digestion of interpersonal tensions.

Both artists use the temporal quality of the material as a metaphor for life itself. Rockwell and Sennhauser have clear intentions for these "experiments," but both realize that they may leave the experience with an entirely altered set of questions. At the dawn of the New Year they've prepared a garden of new beginnings that will morph throughout the coming weeks, ripening, rotting, growing, and perhaps even forgiving.