Saturday, May 8, 2010

The Angry Vegetables

My Angry Vegetable series was in the visual gallery of last year's Fringe Wilmington. I'm trying to decide what to submit for this year's festival and am procrastinating by finally putting together the promised summary of last year's shenanigans.

In my proposal for submission, I explained the veggies thusly:
Mathematics demonstrates the logical elegance of equivalence, showing that equality can be quantified through the alchemy of transitive logic. Philosophy gives us tools to combine logic with judgment to achieve an understanding of good and evil and define their genesis.

You are what you eat.
Some humans are evil.
Hitler was a vegetarian.
Some vegetables are evil.

This series of collages explores and illustrates the latent dark nature of vegetable morality and its root causes (especially of carrots, which tend to have an innate propensity toward evil). Artistic license allows some extension into any food deemed appropriate by vegetarians.

It all started with the Evil Carrots, done in MS Paint, under the influence of both a high fever and Nyquil. A friend reminded me to drink lots of fluids and eat lots of vegetables, suggesting I get a bag of baby carrots to munch on. I explained I hated carrots. I may have been quite vehement. She wondered what they'd ever done to me. I explained that they mocked me. Ceaselessly mocked me.

Not long after creating this stunning piece of art, I rediscovered my love of photography and its shiny, sexy new digital nature. I practiced odd things in Photoshop - which I found frustratingly unintuitive - to try to learn it better (heaven forbid I take a proper course or read a book about it). One night, while shouting at my friend Rich in a grocery store & trying to understand his garbled pickle request (the phone had next to no signal, hence the shouting), I sent him this:

Soon after, the lovely Miss Sarah M requested I show the evil nature of jicamas and tomatillos:

Rich burned me some super cool CDs & I sent this gentleman to thank him:

One night, dangerously bored, I got the idea to redo Fra Angelico's Massacre of the Innocents. Why? I have no idea.


My brother, Dan, though, decided I needed to continue this series seriously & wanted them in a gallery at some point. I thought him insane (and clearly biased), but the idea germinated... As a thank you for his bias, I asked him which vegetable represented him (squash - go figure) and did a horrible one that made it nowhere because it sucked so very much. I will do it justice one day, though!

Next up were the Angry Kohlrabi because my friend Sassy always thought there was something inherently evil about that vegetable:

Then, to celebrate the awesome occasion of Rich's birth, I created a prequel to the Angry Pickle:

... which I then un-Richified for general consumption:

Finally, came a self-portrait inspired by my attempt to explain to a friend how migraines feel:

And then they got accepted at the Fringe Festival and I felt like a pretty, pretty (artsy) princess:

... especially since my dad came!

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