Sierra

Week 11: Cake

My “pandemic” cake is basically the same cake I always make. It’s my go-to chocolate cake recipe:

• 1 ¼ cup flour 

• 1 cup sugar 

• ⅓ cup cocoa powder 

• 1 tsp baking soda 

• ½ tsp salt 

• 1 cup warm water

• 1 tsp vanilla extract 

• ⅓ cup vegetable oil 

• 1 tsp vinegar 

Bake at 350 degrees F for approx. 30 mins. Check with toothpick.

For icing I just mix icing sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, vegan margarine, and either water or soy milk together.

For actual occasions I make two batches of this recipe and layer them with icing in-between.

Week 10: Food Art

The original video is 13 minutes long, but I could only upload this 2-minute version unfortunately.

The original begins with me looking into the camera and then picking up my chopsticks before beginning to eat the rice one grain at a time. It ends with me placing the back down and looking into the camera again.

Week 8: Bread

My family doesn’t have a particularly close relationship to bread. However, growing up, I would eat papo secos (a Portuguese bread) with food when we would go to my Açorean Vovo’s (grandmother’s) house for special occasions and knäckebröd (Swedish rye crispbread) when I visited my grandma and grandpa (my grandma’s heritage is Swedish Finn; the Swedish-speaking population in Finland).

The podcast infuriated me. The claim that bread has resulted in the epidemic of chronic disease racking the industrialized world is scientifically inaccurate. It doesn’t even make common sense. Even Canada’s Food Guide, which has been historically atrocious, is finally seeing the light. People who eat increasing amounts of animal products are at greater risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, obesity, and many other diseases. The science shows this in droves, but the meat, dairy, and egg industries are multi-billion dollar industries with a lot of influence and corruption. On top of that, people don’t like to be told to stop eating animal products for any reason, wether that be their health, the environment, or animals. People living in areas of the world where they eat mainly plant foods have next to no chronic disease, but those living in places that are becoming more industrialized and wealthy are starting to eat more meat, etc. and are increasingly approaching the levels of chronic disease we see in the West. The podcast also presented the idea that insulin resistance is caused by carbohydrates being converted to sugar in our bodies, which is a blatant inaccuracy by omission. By this logic, every single food causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance and diabetes are when our muscles cannot take in the sugar from food (which they need for energy) from our bloodstream, resulting in a buildup in the blood. Excess sugar in the blood is not caused by sugar; it is caused by saturated fat, which prevents our muscles from taking in the sugar and using it. This podcast is perpetuating a dangerous myth that demonized carbohydrates (which are no more that 1 of 3 macronutrients that all food is made up of and which we need for survival: fat, protein, and carbohydrates). It also ignores the true cause of the “diseases of civilization”, which is animal products, that, unlike plants, contain cholesterol and trans fats, in addition to far more saturated fat. This might seem like an overreaction, but I don’t think people realize how serious the state of human health is in the world. We’re living in an age where children in the US are expected to have shorter lifespans than their parents. If you have influence, you have the moral obligation to do your research and accurately portray science, not spread and perpetuate dangerous misinformation that literally costs millions of lives (not including trillions of animal lives) every year. I know this is already over 500 words, but it really made me upset. For the record, the whole grains in whole grain bread protect against chronic disease and white bread isn’t great, but it also isn’t a killer. If you have to choose between eating the bun or the burger, please eat the bun. But yes, of course, eat the lettuce, tomato, and onion too, and order a whole wheat bun if you can- with a veggie burger! If anyone’s reading this, please get your dietary and health info from sources that use multiple sources, site all sources, and check studies for conflicts of interest. Not the news, random blogs, or sites that look reputable, yet only site one or two studies. NutritionFacts.org is amazing.

The critique of bread and grains from an environmental standpoint was also pointless. ~70-90% of all grains go to feeding animals for food, depending on the type of grain. So, if you’re going to critique agriculture in any practical manner, you need to first look at animal agriculture. It makes no sense to even suggest that bread is bad when vegans literally consume less plants than meat eaters and vegetarians (due to the amount of plants needed to produce the same amount of meat, dairy, or eggs). If you ate only bread, you’d have a vastly smaller environmental footprint than the average Canadian.

As an anthropology major, my final critique of the podcast is that the talk of “civilization” and “bread is life” was a bit ethnocentric, as they didn’t mean humanity so much as agricultural societies. It neglected to make clear that not all cultures have bread, or even grains for that matter. I just think the way they went about discussing bread was a bit too all-encompassing and seemed to suggest a universality where there isn’t.

What I was excited to hear from the podcast was the owner of Banjara, because I grew up going to that restaurant near Christie Pits and it’s the best Indian food I’ve ever had. Very nostalgic, warm memories.

I love making art, cooking, and baking. I often think about how it makes sense that I like all these things, because at the core of it, I enjoy creating things. I love making things myself and often get inspired to try making food stuffs that I’d never thought to make myself before. It gets me excited when I realize that I can make (or at least try to make) something I’d previously taken for granted as something to get at the store. For me, art and cooking are almost one and the same and, indeed, I sometimes mix the two. I love the feeling of creating something myself, wether it be a painting, a gift for someone, a cake, or a dinner I’m proud of. I love the satisfaction of completing a project and am often motivated by creating for others, be it any of the things I mentioned previously. I also enjoy experimenting in both areas. I can see why a bunch more people might be making bread during the pandemic, as many people have had more time on their hands and more time at home. More people are trying new things they previously hadn’t had time for (or weren’t bored enough to try haha).

Week 7: Zoom Video Art

Notes

I ended up using all 12 of the ideas I came up with originally and luckily they fit into a perfect arrangement. I wish I had done a video using a cell phone. I thought of that idea after-the-fact.

I had intended for the video to cut in the “Zoom call”, with everything still going on, but when I watched through the video for the first time after throwing all the clips together in the editor, I liked how they all ended at different times and how this emulated people leaving a Zoom call. It was unintentional, but because many of my clips were different lengths, it happened that way. I then edited the lengths more to fit better, as originally the longest ones were way to long and undermined the effectiveness of the piece.

Final Video

Week 4: Nature Video Art

I enjoyed the Tree are Fags walk, found it relaxing, and felt that it did bring me closer to the trees. I went to the little forest near my house (we’d had deep snow the last couple days and it was beautiful, peaceful, and bright). At the end, once I’d found “my tree” and after asking it if I could touch it (as instructed) in Korean (my choice), I ended up standing there with it for a little while longer, appreciating the bark. Then I took a photo of it and went home feeling refreshed.

I thought to do a sort of reverse of the Trees are Fags concept. Whereas the the walk has you follow the directions of a person, I wanted to follow the trees’ directions.

I decided to go back to forest and walk for 5 minutes. I would start walking in a straight line until I met a tree. Then, I would look at the tree and interpret the direction it seemed to be leaning. I would then follow the tree’s direction and walk again in a straight line until I met another tree, repeating the process.

I did four attempts to get the final video. The first take was good except for the fact that I accidentally filmed it in portrait orientation (to be fair, I think this fits the trees’ perspective better). The next two takes were failures terminated part way through, but the last one ended up being the final. The first and last takes (the ones I completed) were perfect walks. By the end of 5 minutes, the trees had had fun messing with me, sending me through messes of branches, across a little valley, and through bushes, but both times the trees directed me back onto the path I had started on by the 5 minute mark.

Final Video

Week 3: Banner

Notes

I began by putting the article into a document and highlighting phrases of interest as I read.

The phrases I liked most:

Narrowing it down further…

I drew the letters free-hand on paper and cut them out, leaving tabs on the tops so that I could hang them from a string.

Final Banner

Week 2: Text Art

I chose to compare Shelly Niro’s piece, The Shirt (2003) and Nadia Myre’s Indian Act (2002) (I will only be commenting on the two photos from The Shirt on the Week 2 page, though I’m aware that the full piece includes more images as I’ve seen it in person).

Although both pieces are comments on colonization by Indigenous Artists in North America, they make use of text very differently. The Shirt consists of photos of the artist wearing a white shirt with text saying different things in each photo. In the first photo, the shirt says, “My ancestors were annihilated, exterminated, murdered and massacred” and in the second photo says, “And all’s I get is this shirt”. Indian Act consists of the printed Indian Act with red and while glass beads sewn overtop so that white beads replace the words and red beads take up the space surrounding the words.

The Shirt evokes the idea of the banal, mass-produced souvenir shirt which tells the reader that someone the wearer knows visited a particular country, but all the wearer got was the shirt. The Shirt contrasts this image with the meaning of the words on the other shirt, which are painful and highly distressing, but make the viewer uncomfortable in the context of what is typically a humorous shirt.

The Indian Act appropriates and uses beading to replace the words of a document which enshrines colonization and serves as a reminder of it’s effects. In this way, the artist erases the Indian Act with a traditional craft which has survived colonization.

Week 1: Book Stacks

Notes

Artist Nina Katchadourian often makes book stacks from private and public collections, constructing a kind of portrait of the owner or place using sequences of titles. She begins by looking through the books and writing down titles of interest. She then transfers the titles onto cue cards and experiments with arranging them into different sequences. Her final step is to collect the books and arrange them into the final stacks.

Katchadourian often creates narratives out of the book title sequences. They may be abstract, humorous, or thought-provoking. My personal favourites are A Day at the Beach and Primitive Art:

These two stacks perfectly capture the humorous aspect to Katchadourian’s work which I love. The narratives are well constructed for easy reading and comprehension and the book tiles create such a deadpan humour when read. In my own stacks, I attempted to bring some of Katchadourian’s narrative style to my own stacks.

Final Stacks