By Rachel Beckman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Last week at Transformer Gallery, people were eating "newspaper soup," a boiled mixture of water, chicken bouillon and strips of newspaper. Artist Carolina Mayorga served the chunky, inky concoction to a few brave attendees, one of whom said it tasted like "dirty chicken."
Transformer's Executive Director Victoria Reis sipped the newspaper soup broth but "didn't go there with the chunks," she says.
"I figure the alcohol kills the toxic stuff," Reis says, gesturing to her glass of white wine.
Mayorga was inspired to create the art installation, called "New Trends in South American Cuisine," after hearing about people eating newspaper soup in Colombia, where she is from.
"It's about poverty because people do that out of starvation," Mayorga says. "It's also playing with the idea of consumerism."
Her show included a video of a mock infomercial for the soup and packages of the ingredients, on sale for $1.50. Mayorga would sell only one package per customer because "you only get what you need," she says. She sold about 45 packages at the opening reception.
The soup's list of ingredients takes a jab at the media: Each package says it contains two cups of advertisements, one cup of sports and only 1/2 teaspoon of art and culture (she used The Washington Post for all of her soup).
During the reception, Mayorga played merengue music and cooked under a picture of palm trees at sunset.
"I wanted to play with the stereotype of Latinos being dancers and always festive," she says.
Mayorga's installation kicked off a series of week-long exhibitions at Transformer called "E4: Station to Station." The series features the four participants in this year's Exercises for Emerging Artists program, which links artists with mentors for biweekly critiques.
Tonight, Arlington-based video artist Rob Parrish will present his new work, "Jack" (as in Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland's character in TV's "24"). Parrish combines footage from "24" with the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded threat advisory system. It's a video about lying, and it critiques both "24" and the advisory system as "absurd propaganda," Parrish says.
Rebecca C. Adams and Fereshteh Toosi will present their work in the coming weeks. Adams, a former figure skater, will explore the iconic figure eight through sound and drawing.
Inside the gallery she'll play recordings of the swish-swoosh of herself ice skating. Outside on P Street, she'll draw figure eights by attaching chalk to in-line skates. Adams plans to skate each day around 2 a.m. to avoid cars.
Toosi is setting up a faux accounting firm called H&R CABBAGE to calculate gallery visitors' personal carbon emissions. She'll be at Transformer full time from Aug. 1 to 4 for this performance piece, titled "You're Not as Green as You Are Cabbage-Looking."
Toosi says she's poking fun at the trendiness of environmentalism and also giving people a tangible idea of their carbon footprints.
"I'm usually interested in things that are in the spotlight because they come and go," she says. "In fact, it's a very long-lasting issue."
"E4: Station to Station" runs through Aug. 4 at Transformer Gallery, 1404 P St. NW. Wednesday-Saturday, 1-7 p.m. Free. 202-483-1102.
The Port Huron ProjectArtist Mark Tribe is traveling around the East Coast, restaging protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and '70s. His series, called the Port Huron Project after the 1962 manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), stops here next Thursday at the Washington Monument. Tribe is an assistant professor of culture and media at Brown University.
"When I read these speeches, I was struck by how relevant they are now," he says. "It's almost as if they could have been written today."
The Port Huron Project has traveled to Boston and New York to re-create speeches given by author and activist Howard Zinn and by Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr.
In Washington, an actor will perform a speech originally delivered by Paul Potter, president of SDS, at a 1965 march on the Mall.
"The president says that we are defending freedom in Vietnam," the Potter speech says. "Whose freedom? Not the freedom of the Vietnamese."
See video of the Coretta Scott King reenactment at http://porthuronproject.blip.tv.
The speech is at 6 p.m. July 26 (rain date July 27) at Constitution Avenue and 15th Street NW. Free. http://www.porthuronproject.net.
Shore Wins Sondheim PrizeTony Shore received the $25,000 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize at a ceremony last week at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Shore works in acrylic on velvet and paints scenes of blue-collar life in Baltimore, or as he lovingly refers to them, "white trash on black velvet." He plans to use the money to build a studio in his back yard.
Shore, 35, got a little teary as he accepted the award from Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon.
"Right away I was pretty emotional, but the two things that I knew I had to remember to say was I wanted to speak about Walter Sondheim . . . and how inspirational he was," Shore says. "And I knew I had to thank my wife."
Work from all seven of the Sondheim finalists is on display through Aug. 5. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr. (at North Charles and 31st streets), Baltimore. 443-573-1700. http://www.artbma.org. Open Wednesday-Friday from 11 to 5, Saturdays and Sundays from 11 to 6. Free.
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