In this group exhibition, students, graduates, and instructors from Portage College, the University of Alberta, and HDK-Valand - Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) contemplate our bonds with food from cultural, economic, scientific, and wild perspectives.
Organized by Portage College and the University of Alberta. Curated by Pierre Öberg, Royden Mills, and Karl-Johan Skogh
Through art, design and food culture, we can explore and make sense of our history, present, and future. These realms reach both the most vulnerable and the most intimate aspects of our existence—our survival, our pleasure. Food becomes a tool to critically examine the world around us, opening space for engagement with ongoing discourses.
Art is more vital today than ever, offering resistance, support, new possibilities. We must ground ourselves in its imaginative power, crafting narratives where food culture holds a central place in everyone’s life. Food unites us in a planetary melting pot, where the senses take over, and art becomes our language.
We are honoured to be part of this exhibition and hope our participation contributes to an impact that makes necessary change possible.
Let us invite one another—tasting our way toward a shared, sustainable future.
– Karl-Johan Skogh
This exhibition acknowledges the liberty each artist has to reflect on the fragile future of food in our era. There was no prescription, no assignment that lead them into describing anything about their relationship to food in particular, but in the efforts they each make here the breadth might open a great spectrum of souls to see they are not alone in how they feel about food, nutrition, animals, cooking, responsibility, empathy, art making and serving a community.
Truly, they could have submitted anything to the committee. Selections were made based on aesthetics, thoughtfulness, and as we hope you agree, food is an art from, cooking obviously, but who hasn’t come home and placed the groceries on the table such that overwhelming gratitude for its nourishment comes to our minds, but also its beauty.
How can anyone carve a pepper to eat without thinking the interior is as beautiful of sculptural form as ever a human hand has managed to make?
– Excerpt by Royden Mills
Food and the vital gifts provided from mother earth are as varied and complex as the relationships we have with this lifegiving force that nourishes and sustains us all. In this exhibition, deleTABLE – The Future and Fragility of Food, arts students and instructors from Portage College, the University of Alberta, and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, look at the multi-faceted relationships we have with food, producing an abundance of artworks that explore the various themes of food culture including: food production and sustainability, environmental impacts and conservation, industrial food production and organic growing practices, medicinal qualities of food and foraging of wild foods, food sovereignty, and the cultural traditions of food. In addition, the artworks are created from a diverse range of rural, urban, regional, provincial, international, and multi-cultural perspectives. We welcome you to explore this visual smorgasbord with us, peruse the menu, whet your palette, and order up of side of studio-to-table art, with a drizzle of artisanal handcrafted creativity, fresh from the gallery walls. Then, and as is enthusiastically suggested by our fellow guest curator, Karl-Johan Skogh, EAT YOUR ART!
– Pierre Öberg