Food is one of painting's most enduring subjects, first appearing on cave walls depicting scenes of the hunt in places like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. Representations of food appear in Ancient Egyptian tombs as painted reliefs of tables brimming with edibles for the deceased to feed on in the afterlife. Throughout art history, from the feasts depicted by Flemish and Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to still life masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists have engaged in the challenge of representing food, as symbol, reality, and illusion. The elemental appeal of food imagery is to preserve short-lived pleasures and treasures, to record and give permanent form to the perishable. Mass production, food engineering and advertising, however, have altered our culture's perceptions on food by eliminating the concept of a finite supply.

In the latter half of this century, the food industry has engaged in the construction of a food image, an image that references only itself, disconnected from an actual object. When we think of coffee we are more likely to think of Starbuck's than a plant in Colombia. There is often a wide discrepancy between the images that entice us to eat and the actual foods before us. Thus, in today's culture food has become an elaborate political intersection between desire and industry. In this exhibition, Brownell will be presenting a new body of work that expands upon the gray area between nature and this constructed artifice, calling attention to the specific content in food, an issue that is only now beginning to be addressed. For example, corn DNA spliced with pesticides, altered salmon, tomatoes containing fish genes, all demand an altered visual perspective.