Relics is a sculptural project by Christopher Reynolds that investigates the nature of cultural preservation, decay, and consumption through the material transformation of historical foodie texts. Fascinated by relics as surviving fragments of the past, Reynolds selects iconic tomes of culinary instruction—such as Emily Post’s Etiquette and Prosper Montagné’s Larousse Gastronomique—as the foundation for this body of work. These books, once revered guides for middle-class aspirational living and bourgeois culinary refinement, become sites of radical material intervention.
Each book in the series is soaked in approximately eight pounds of liquified Monosodium Glutamate (MSG), the controversial flavor-enhancing additive commonly found in snack foods, processed meals, and industrialized food production around the world. Often dismissed in Western food culture as a cheap shortcut for flavor or vilified as a foreign "contaminant" attacking culinary authenticity, MSG here serves as an agent of both physical transformation and cultural critique.
As the books absorb the liquid MSG, their structures begin to betray their original forms: spines split, pages crimp and swell, and crystallized boils erupt across their surfaces. These revered lexicons of social order and gastronomic expertise are rendered grotesque, their once-rigid pages now bloated and vulnerable. In this process, Reynolds metaphorically transforms these symbols of bourgeois instruction into bloated, overindulgent bodies—dangerously swollen consumers craving ever more.
Relics thus confronts viewers with the instability of cultural authority and the inevitable deterioration of systems built on ideals of refinement and control. By subjecting these texts to the very forces of excess and artificial enhancement they once distanced themselves from, Reynolds collapses the distinction between high and low culture, exposing the shared vulnerabilities that underlie systems of taste, class, and consumption.
Through the visceral, organic transformation of these historical objects, Relics proposes that no canon—culinary or otherwise—is immune to the processes of corruption, consumption, and collapse. What remains are distorted, haunting monuments to the fragile infrastructures of cultural legacy.