Meat Growers: A Love Story
2019 - Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
13:42 minutes
Rindon Johnson
The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire. In the play, gender is never mentioned, and race is ambiguous. The viewer’s character carpools to work in a solar VW bug, listening to their colleagues’ enthusiastic monologues, and watching the landscape roll by. The conversation revolves around their relationship with the natural landscape around them, with disease, modes of production, and survival needs, but moves on to discussions of intimacy, and is suffused throughout with love and longing between the two. This VR play was staged using a game engine, and the ready-made aesthetics of this contribute to the sense that the work creates one version of the future (among many possibilities) being prototyped—a decidedly less than utopian version, but one that makes space for labor, love, and survival.
Rindon Johnson’s work in sculpture, video, poetry, and virtual reality deals with technologies that enable captivity and the harnessing and transformation of nature from a gender- and race-critical perspective. A central motif in his work is the cow, which has been bred for centuries with an eye to maximum profit and consumer pleasure. He often uses cowhide as a sculptural material, drawing out connotations that relate to the commodification of bodies and the attendant destruction this brings. A past collaborator of Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Johnson came to virtual reality through the practice of writing poetry. In both poetry and VR, Johnson observes, “worlds can be endless, limitless, emotional, tyrannical.” Thus, Johnson’s practice is unique for its thematic and material connection of the very old and the very new, the emotional and the embodied, and as a way of thinking through climate grief and crisis.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » GALERIE MAGAZINE
5 Must-See Artworks at ZonaMaco 2024 - Galerie Subscribe Art + Culture Interiors Style + Design Emerging Artists Discoveries Artist Guide More Creative Minds Life Imitates Art Real estate Events Video Galerie House of Art and Design Subscribe About Press Advertising Contact Us Follow Galerie Sign up to receive our newsletter Subscribe ZONAMACO 2024...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Air Con: Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints October 8, 2021 By Dhinesha Karthigesu (1,330 words, 5-minute read) Who do you want to be when you grow up? At the end of the play AIR CON , the character William (Nick Davis) asks the character Asif (Ryan Lee Bhaskaran) this question...
© » KADIST
John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
2018Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Book Review: "The State and The Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions" | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Images courtesy of Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore April 9, 2019 By Chin Ailin (734 words, four-minute read) Commissioned by the Institute of Policy Studies of Singapore (IPS) to trace the course of cultural policy in Singapore from the 1950s to the present, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions is a comprehensive tome that should serve as an essential text in time to come for any student’s introduction to Singapore’s arts and cultural policies...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
MervEspina and the Green Papaya Art Projects (via The Myanmar Times) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 22, 2018 With the support of Japan Foundation and collaboration of Myanm/Art, MervEspina, artist and researcher from Philippines talked about Green Papaya Art Projects whose essence can be rendered as ‘never ripe, never rotten’...
© » ARTNEWS RETROSPECTIVE
Howardena Pindell on the Exclusion of Black Artists in the 1980s – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 14, 2021 1:13pm ©ARTnews Over the past several years, museums and galleries have made concerted efforts to show work by Black artists, responding to growing calls for equity...
© » ARTOMITY
Mathew Brandt at Rossi & Rossi – ARTOMITY 藝源 Mathew Brandt / Learning to Surf Jan 27 – Mar 9, 2024 / Opening: Saturday, Jan 27, 2pm – 6pm / Rossi & Rossi 11F, 54 Wong Chuk Hang Road Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong +852 2116 5282 Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm rossirossi.com The outcome of Matthew Brandt’s (b...
© » KADIST
Tobias Fike & Matthew Harris
2013Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter...
© » KADIST
Lim Sokchanlina
2017The photographic series Wrapped Future II by Lim Sokchanlina brings fences used on construction sites to enclose the surrounding areas, to different locations, lakes, valleys and forests; and places them at the center of works to obscure the beautiful Cambodian landscape...