False Food—Jerry Takigawa
by Robert Reese, Executive Director
The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts
False Food, the current Cherry Center exhibit, rests on the assumption that a distinct and memorable artistic aesthetic can emerge by focusing on materials that have caused irreversible harm to a countless number of birds. For the exhibit, Carmel Valley photographer Jerry Takigawa was concerned by what the plastic flotsam and jetsam found in the entrails of the Pacific albatross said about us as a disposable society.
Plastic has a life span of roughly 450 years. As it breaks down in water, plastic turns into minute particles that are swallowed by marine life—from sea birds to fish. All this ingested plastic distresses the food chain all the way up to us. Harmful chemicals, leached by plastics, are already present in the tissue and bloodstream of everyone— including newborns. Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1 million sea creatures a year.
In False Food, Jerry Takigawa expresses metaphors that fulfill aesthetic, political and environmental concerns, though sometimes those pairings seem willfully contradictory. Pictorially, Takigawa’s work conveys a kind of terrible beauty by pairing Japanese symmetry and design with a devastating ecological calamity. At the same time, Takigawa’s work is informed by a commitment to those issues in ways that surprise, disclose and uncover. Salvaging such defiant beauty from plastic artifacts recovered from the albatross provides a compelling metaphor of survival in the modern world—both human and animal.
Although the representation of these issues seems prominent throughout the work it is by no means Takigawa’s primary concern. The artist’s scope of interests is vast and aesthetically diverse. The work calls attention to industrial and technological revolutions, consumption, issues of sustainability and the aesthetics of so-called nonartistic material. The exhibit also deals with physical and emotional scarification related to issues of loss, beauty and identity. False Food bears witness to these apprehensions and uncovers our own.
