Portraits by Joshua Mark Logan
In the Spring of 2013, Reynolds and fellow artist Marco Rios co-taught an art history course, “Gastro-Aesthetics: The History of Food in Art”. Both of artists frequently explore topics of food/consumption within our individual art practices and were selected to lead this course with an emphasis on a critical approach to food and art. The course examined our societal relationship to food, art history, and its influences on popular culture.
Course Work offered visitors the opportunity to investigate the different ways selected art movements have incorporated and worked with the medium and subject of food by focusing on the relationships between gastronomy and aesthetics. Through special menus, selected texts, installations, full course dinners, and visitor participation, Course Work investigated the various ways art consumes food and food informs art. Three distinct courses were presented throughout the residency. Each course was inspired by an influential art movement and corresponding time period, and emphasized by a limited-seating full course dinner event. Course One covered Romanticism through Post--Impressionism and examine the birth of Gourmandism and the modern restaurant with Brillat—Savarin’s groundbreaking treatise, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Course Two focused on Dadaism/Futurism/Surrealism, covering the strategies of infamous futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinett’s Futurist Cookbook and Salvador Dali’s Le Diners de Gala. Lastly, Course Three offered the Pop movement a turn in the kitchen, where Reynolds and Rios shared Andy Warhol’s chapter, “Atmosphere,” from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) along with iconic food art, consumer products, essays from Roland Barthes, and supermarket aesthetics from the period.