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...
© » KADIST
Abigail DeVille
2017The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years...
© » KADIST
Laura Henno
2018N°001 Djoubi et sa meute is part of a series of photographs by Laura Henno titled Ge Ouryao! ...
© » SLASH PARIS
Françoise Pétrovitch — Dans mes mains — Semiose Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Françoise Pétrovitch — Dans mes mains — Semiose Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Françoise Pétrovitch — Dans mes mains Exhibition Drawing, painting Upcoming Françoise Pétrovitch Courtesy de l’artiste & Semiose, Paris Françoise Pétrovitch Dans mes mains In about 1 month: January 13 → March 9, 2024 Françoise Pétrovitch’s upcoming exhibition at Semiose is centered around an imposing bronze sculpture entitled Dans mes mains (In My Hands)...
© » KADIST
Jonas Bendiksen
2021For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton...
© » 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’...
© » 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...
© » KADIST
Ayoung Kim
2019In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt...
© » KADIST
Michael Armitage
2015In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message...
.jpg)
