Jeff Werner

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I'm a designer in Vancouver, Canada. I work at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, am a director of the 221A Artist Run Centre, and a member of Fieldwork design collective. I'm an Emily Carr and University of Victoria graduate and have worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. I'm a cycling advocate and race on the Garneau Evolution team.

School, September 22, 2005 7:49 PM 3 comments

Artichoke

An look at my first significant assignment at art school, with an overview of my creative process in developing an idea to produce a work that explores the dimensions and narrative of a single fruit or vegetable.

Dimensions of Knowing Assignment
Creative Processes, ECIAD

Directions

1. Pick a Fruit or Vegetable
2. Discover the "dimensions of knowing this food"
3. Imagine this fruit/vegetable were extinct: how would you represent it?
4. All art, in some way, tells a story.
5. Also think of the mystery of a narrative

Initial Reactions

ARTICHOKE: Specifically GLOBE artichoke. From MEDITERRANEAN, in the US (and thus Canada). 100 per cent of artichokes are GROWN IN CALIFORNIA.

First thought: FRUIT LABELS and SALMON CAN LABELS
Second thought: ARTICHOKE after riding through California this summer.
My experience: MEXICAN LABOUR, bandanas over face, rush, GUERILLAS

These labourers likely harvest a large portion of the FOOD I bought on my trip and food we buy here in CANADA.

ELEMENTS informing my PROCESS

• Artichoke as interesting plant
• Mexican Labourers
• WORKER REVOLUTION

SOVIET revolution PROPAGANDA posters.

So on the one hand I'm drawn to a sort of call to action for the Mexican workers and their struggle as second-class citizens. And they have a long history in Californian agriculture as the majority of its workforce for the past 100 years.

So I tried to combine this history and relate it the artichoke and my own brief, subjective experience of it. So I amalgamated multiple perspectives: the traditional fruit label style--which effectively ignored the industry's exploitation--such as:

• Bright colours
• Painted
• Some sort of interaction between the vegetable and some personification of an American consumer

with that set of the symbols of communist worker art:

• Working people
• Strong diagonals
• Monumental scale

Composition

MYSTERY / AMBIGUITY. The relationship between the workers depicted and the artichoke doesn't necessarily establish a confrontational message between Mexican workers and the produce corporations.

Because who am I to represent the plight of these people? I was merely a tourist riding by.

I wonder if artichoke picking is not a prized job to get. Strawberry or cauliflower are very low to the ground, delicate and/or labour-intensive to pick. Artichokes stand on long stems at arm's height and appear pretty easy to pluck.

MULTIPLE READINGS the piece could be interpreted in a number of ways.

Finally, I reinforced the contemporary context by mounting the work on a flattened cardboard fruit crate from California, and to express my own subjectivity--my personal framing of the issues--I created a border of black chain grease taken directly from my bicycle (and the actual grease it accumulated during my travels in California).