Food-inspired exhibit offers Boulder a full menu of art

You can almost hear slurping when you see Ana Maria Botero’s “Watermelon 2.” The Longmont painter so hungrily went for the reds in this work that you think of children diving into a plate of watermelon on a hot afternoon. She set aside a heaping portion of her picture space for the watermelon’s luscious meat and chomped away eagerly with her brush. She savored the color’s orange and pink flavors, which gave its overall red sweet depth and texture.

Looking at it, you can just taste it, and it could very well have been taste that served Botero’s painting a first-place award during the June 20 opening of A Taste of Art gallery exhibition at The Dairy Center for the Arts. The exhibit, in its second year, features about 170 works of all kinds by 104 artists, making it the biggest show by quantity at The Dairy in recent memory.

Most of the artists come from Boulder, but many are based in Longmont, Fort Collins and other Front Range cities, as well as elsewhere in Colorado and more than a dozen other states, from California to South Carolina.

The work on display is supposed to be “food reflected in art from the sublime to the playful,” according to The Dairy’s definition, and that’s a pretty good description of the show. There are Old Master-ish still lifes. That’s the sublime. And there is Rebecca Cuming, whose piece, one of the “playful” offerings, is called “Cupcake.” Its medium, a wall card informs us, is “oil and socks on canvas.”

There is also the funny: Dusty Demerson gets laughs with “Hot Peppers,” a photograph of miniature firefighters trying to douse combustible peppers. The modern: Glenna Cole Allee’s “Goldie the Buttercow” is the exhibit’s sole video work (though the curator said that the flying cow in Allee’s video is actually a winning cow made of butter from the Iowa State Fair, and that also counts as funny).

And the disturbing: One portion of the exhibition is a full course of politically charged images related to the consumer-food industry, and it might cause some internal discomfort. Sam Cikauskas’ woodcut “Fowl Play,” for example, suggests the brutality that occurs inside a chicken processing plant.

The exhibition is actually two shows, a salon-like display of works by artists from across the country and a second display, in a hallway known as the In-Focus Gallery, of photographs by Pat Willard, of Redwood City, Calif. Willard’s show, titled “The Dream Life of Fruits and Vegetables,” is a series of gelatin silver prints. The images are portraits of what appear to be root vegetables that were left out for days and left to do what they do. Stems shoot out of some. Some smell, you can be sure. They’re in states of decay and renewal, revolting as food but miraculous in regeneration.

Whether visitors leave the exhibit satisfied or complaining of the service, they will have much to digest. If they’re like Willard, they’ll be changed.

“In the past, I never gave thought to where I bought my food or where it came from,” he wrote about working on his food photos. “But now I give more consideration to what I eat, to where and how it is grown, and from whom I buy it.”

Quentin Young: quentin@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/qpyoungnews