Eat at the Soft Machine

Jessie Horning, Bucknell art graduate assistant and artist, is good with food. At the opening of her show at the Soft Machine Gallery in Allentown this month, visitors could not tell the difference between her art installation and the reception fare. See the pictures above if you don’t believe me. I ate some of it.

Her work combines a pop-art sensibility (think Claes Oldenburg’s squishy or out-of-scale reproductions of everyday objects) updated with a contemporary art focus on food as a way of blurring the lines between art and “real life” (Rirkrit Tiravanija et al) which of course, also blends naturally, and not coincidentally, with the current DIY/foodie aesthetic.

But who cares about all that? How does it taste?! Well, as much as edible art brings art and real life together, the gallery also serves to re-frame and exoticize the everyday, causing us to see it differently, if only for the moment. The delicious tension of that moment, and how long it lingers, is, as they say, ripe with possibilities. In that spirit, the cocoa-peanut cookies looked suspicious, but in the end, tasted great.