Angel City Eats. AT LONG LAST the show is opening!

Gallery KM is pleased to present Angel City Eats, a multi-media installation created as a collaboration between father and daughter Jackson and Sienna De Govia.  The exhibition explores two of Los Angeles's most notorious obsessions—celebrity and food—and does so through dueling yet complimentary visions of Los Angeles as it has been represented in the popular lexicon: that of the 1950's television show Dragnet , and that of contemporary Kardashian-dominated Reality TV.   The exhibition features larger-than-life painted characters on cutout wood flats by Jackson, and Baroque-styled food sculptures by Sienna made from materials including glass, clay, metal, fabric, edible candy and cake.  The sculptures and character paintings are combined to create tableaux that viewers are invited to move through and around as they navigate the exhibition space, as well as large wall-mounted pieces, including overlapping headshot portraits by Jackson and a rotating mechanical sculpture of diminutive kicking boots by Sienna. The gallery will hold a reception for the artists on December 10th, from 5-8pm, during which guests will be encouraged to consume several edible sculptures. In Angel City Eats, two artists who have spent their careers constructing fantasies for public consumption utilize the tools of their trade to deconstruct and re-examine those fantasies.  Jackson De Govia, production designer for iconic films such as Die Hard and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Sienna De Govia, food stylist for print and television including reality shows like Grill It with Bobby Flay, take their personal perceptions and observations of our culture of consumption and turn them back on us, inviting us into a participatory experience of the City of Angels in two of its most memorable moments of simulation. The exhibition space is divided into two rooms, each of which will be devoted to one of the two time periods.  The main room of the gallery will be dominated by figure groups representing the caffeinated and nicotined 1950’s Los Angeles of Dragnet’s Joe Friday, and the smaller gallery room will be transformed into Kim Kardashian’s 21st century super-celebrity society.  In the Dragnet room, we stand next to Joe Friday and his partner Ben Alexander in front of a locker overflowing with cascading fabric doughnuts, while in the room next door Kim Kardashian’s entourage, here called the Celebritards, sport Byzantine halos of candy delicacies and worship the glorified Kim—bursting naked from a crumpled wedding dress. The sensory experience of Angel City Eats is purposefully overwhelming and hyper-saturated, meant to evoke an emotional response.  Jackson’s prettily constructed figures instill a reaction in the viewer similar to that of a theme park—fantasy at its populace-numbing and entertaining best—and when combined with the ornate detail and candied excess of Sienna’s food sculptures, the effect is disorienting and revealingly saccharine.  By inviting us into these scenes of crime, punishment and excess, the De Govia's remind us both of the consistency of our desire for dramatic simulation, and our complicity in the fantasies we consume. Jackson De Govia is an Emmy award winning production designer, with over four decades of experience in film, television, and theater.  Sienna De Govia received a BFA in sculpture from the California College of Arts in Oakland in 1999, and works as a food stylist for print, television and film.  This is their first professional artistic collaboration.

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Violence and Horsey Sauce

The talented Alex Blagg makes me want to get all crazy with a bag of fries.  I don't really need any extra encouragement in the drama and fast food departments but I'll take it any way I can get it.


http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/6agv

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Coffee, Milk and Cigs

Apparently in the 50's that's all you needed to survive.  Maybe the occasional donut.  Be careful though. According to Joe Friday those sweet little morsels of fried dough were siren hussies with a little too much jelly in their roll.  Indulge one too many times and you were headed for the gutter.  

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Head in an Art Hole

So I've been off the grid for a loooong time.  Here's the deal:  I'm working on a big gallery installation with my Dad (which is awesome on many levels) that opens in December at Gallery KM in Santa Monica.  Because I still have to pay my rent and buy food to eat, my time has been split pretty evenly between working on killer food styling gigs and hunching over my living room table with this ultra nerdy magnifying head lamp on painting teeny tiny sculptures of food.  Husband, cats and blog all terribly neglected due to the demands of the muse.  I can't help it if my muse calls for chili dogs on the heads of pins and streaming Grey's Anatomy marathons.  She wants what she wants.  This is her by the way:

I know!  It's really weird that Madonna the kitchen goat is the all powerful force behind my art making mania, but you love who you love.  At any rate, I figured the least I could do is start sharing some of the results of all this hunkering down:

 Celibritard Halo 1

Trust me folks, these will make a lot more sense in the context of the installation, so clear your schedule December 10th for the opening.  In the mean time amuse yourselves trying to find your favorite itty bitty junk food item and pondering whether or not Derek will EVER be able to forgive Meredith for compromising the results of the Alzheimer's trial and make a go of starting a family with the African baby they kinda adopted.  

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Escher in Cupcakes

My young friend Dutch Clark created this portrait of m.c. escher in cupcakes

a massive undertaking, and a good likeness. 

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The Female Form Continues to Inspire

The Hohle Fels Venus is about 35,000 years old proving that a good looking pair of gams and a nice set of knockers has been inspiring human kind to pay homage to the fairer sex for a great long while.  

In one of our many forays into the intersection of art and food photography Renee and I created this fried chicken in repose.  She's a little sassier than the Hohle Fels gal but the idea is the same.  Two hot babes, working it.

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It's enough to drive you crazy.

photography by Renee Anjanette hostess snowball styling by moi

Too much of a good thing can be bad for you.  Too much of a highly processed, fluorescent pink, pseudo baked good can push you right over the deep end.   

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Dolley Madison Saves President Washington!

photo generously provided by Charles Schiller

Ok so this charming fella I work with recently told me the story of his unusual childhood birthday cake requests and it goes something like this:  At around age 8 Richard's birthday was fast approaching.  His mom ( a very devoted and loving mother by all general standards) asked her young son what he would like for his birthday cake.  Being of a particularly patriotic nature, Richard requested Washington's Cherry Tree rendered in cake form, and could they please have miniature hatchets to eat it with at the party.  Not wanting to disappoint, his mother did her very best to create the cherry tree and the party went off without a hitch.  A year rolls by and it's time again for Richard's birthday party.  Again his mom asks what he would like for his cake.  Again Richard reaches into his store of presidential folklore for inspiration and declares that he would like "Abe Lincoln's Log Cabin surrounded by a Field of Golden Wheat."  Some how his mom is able to summon all of her latent creativity to the fore and pulls off a passable log cabin cake perched atop an icing field of wheat.  The next year when asked for his cake choice Richard declared grandly:
"I want Dolley Madison Fleeing the Burning White House with the Portrait of Washington Under Her Arm!"  Needless to say Richard's mom refused point blank and young Richard got a plain spice cake that year.  When I heard the story I just HAD to attempt a version of the insane edible object.  On a recent two week shoot I put this baby together on the sly and was able to surprise grown up Richard with his Dolley Madison Cake at long last.

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Death by Wedding Cake

photography by Renee Anjanette Kalmar food styling by yours truly

  I find the aesthetic of the baked good utterly irresistible.  Wedding cakes in particular are fantastical beautiful creatures that call to me with their siren song.  But the moment I succumb and take that first bite I am screwed.  The cake drags me down into the depths of indulgence and I feel sick.  

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Tentacles make a lovely cuff, don't you think?

photo by Renee Anjanette Kalmar

I love commercial food styling.  But when I'm strolling through the aisles at the different markets around town my artist brain turns on and I start seeing food in a different light.  The "wow that would make a great accessory if only it wouldn't rot and attract flies"  sort of light.  The talented Renee is my partner in crime.  Together we have collaborated on a series of "food as accessory" images.  Here's a peek at one of the slimier ones.  The model, my friend Emily (owner of an amazing popsicle company, by the way) felt conflicted about wearing this bit of sushi around her wrist.   The week we shot, a two-spotted octopus at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium managed to flood the entire building by pulling out a water recycling tube in it's tank.  Emily felt that an animal with such an inquisitive nature should not end up around her wrist.  She's probably right, but it looked so pretty in the sushi pack next to the wasabi and ginger.  A jewel toned sucker cuff.  Fancy!

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Three square meals to erase the evil snacks

photo by Eric Tucker

When I was a kid I would frequently perform food experiments on myself.  For example, I didn't understand why you couldn't eat the WHOLE box of cookies.  Why not eat them all?  The sixteenth one tastes just as good as the first one.  Why all these silly limitations and discussions about moderation?  If we're going to tackle this box of cookies, we're going to do it RIGHT!  No quitters here, no sir.  So one night, I woke up in a silent sleeping house and I snuck down to the kitchen to get to the bottom of this ridiculous rule cookie rule.  About half way through a box of Chips Ahoy the answer became (barfily) clear to me.  Too much junk food will make you sick.  Later on I developed a spicy chili antidote to the sugar blues.  I found that eating a protein packed bowl of savory chili alleviated the soupy angry discontent of a sugar saturated stomach.  These days I try to avoid the total abandon to sugar gluttony that brings on the barfy feeling in the first place, but Ethan's nostalgic junk food buffet got the best of me.  So here are three square meals of solid protein to set me right!  We shot this ages ago.  Eric has a great sense of the absurd.  He comes up with bizarre concepts that I have to bring into fruition with my food styling wiles.  It's always a blast to work on his projects.  

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Death by Dough

photography by Renee Anjanette Kalmar

Ever feel this way when rolling out pizza dough?  I do.

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Meet the Meat.....ship that is.

photo by Teri Lyn Fisher

I think this speaks for itself, but I will add, I stopped eating bacon for three whole days after I made this.

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Oh, that I were a cookie

Photo by Renee Anjanette

For the season Renee indulged my fantasy of creating a hot cocoa hot tub.  In actuality I would like to be  the one bathing in the brown stuff, but nobody wants to see that.

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Cake Hat

photo by Renee Anjanette Kalmar

In a perfect world all of my hats would be made of cake.  That way if I ever got caught on a really long bus ride, I'd always have something to snack on. 

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