Profile: Joan Steiner
Joan Steiner uses food as part of a playful photographic sleight of hand that has translated into a major children’s book series.
Steiner is known for her book series “”Look-Alikes,” which features intricate assemblages of everyday scenes built entirely of small objects standing in for their larger, real world counterparts.
She will show her work as part of “You Art What You Eat: Food As Art Material,” which opens on Friday, Oct. 3, at Kidspace in Mass MoCA.
For the Kidspace show, fans of Steiner’s books will have the opportunity to see her scenes jump out of the pages, with four dioramas on display, including two construction sites, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Sydney Opera House.
Steiner began her creative career creating “wearable art” — one hat she made looked like a fishing boat with a little fisherman in it, a veil created by the net he was throwing out. This translated into a career as a commercial illustrator of a different sort — Steiner created 3-dimensional structures that would then be photographed for final use. Her eventual use of stand-in objects did not happen overnight.
“You creep into this sort of thing,” she said during a recent interview.
She said she approached Games Magazine with the idea for a puzzle that was the culmination of what she had already been doing in her work.
“A magazine would call up and say, ‘We want a picture of a doctorwatering a plant and growing money,’ so I’d make a 3-dimensional model of the doctor and the plant and the money on the plant,” she said.
Steiner had been using the idea of having one thing look like another on a selected basis in her illustration work — the eventual piece for Games took it to the extreme, making it the point of the image.
Eventually, food became part of her palette.
“Food was a very useful, common, everyday object — it looked like a lot of things,” she said. “It was inevitable that I would use food in the whole array of objects that I would call upon.”
Steiner’s process was a mixture of eureka moments and experimentation.
“I remember one time when I was driving down the street and I saw cement mixers, and I just thought, ‘Wow, mustard bottles!’ It popped out of the blue,” she said. “But then I have to think very hard — ‘How can I use a cement mixer? OK, I’ll make a construction site.’ And then I would have to work very hard at finding other look-alikes that would work with the cement mixer model to make a whole construction site, and the thing would just grow and grow and grow. I’d look at photographs and do research and spend hours and hours at Wal-Mart or the supermarket looking at things and trying to build a starting concept.”
Once she began using food, however, some of the rules changed. She might have that moment when she realizes that lasagna would make excellent draperies, but working with perishables brings up all sorts of considerations about materials. Some food is as sturdy as any other object.
“There’s the food that never, ever spoils, and it’s very scary some of the things you get out of the refrigerator case — eight years later and they’re still pretty much intact,” Steiner said. “I have a little ravioli I got out. It’s 10 years old and it’s still there.”
However, the more delicate material requires constant upkeep to the scene due to curling, shriveling and other deterioration.
“I made some little throw rugs out of burritos and slices of salami in a living room scene and I had to change them every half hour,” Steiner said. “I had the same problem with mushrooms that I used as whitewall tires on an old-fashioned car. They would shrivel up and turn brown incredibly quickly.”
With food, she said, it’s no different from the process with any other material — you need to make sure you have enough of it to experiment with.
“For the really super-perishable stuff I have to get a batch of it just to try it out and make sure it works,” she said. “At the time of the shoot, I have to go back and replace it with fresh stuff. But some of the things never, ever, ever go bad. Cheese doodles? Forget it — you could put them in an Egyptian tomb and they’d be fine.”
Using food as artistic material has led to problems for Steiner in the past.
“My dirty little secret is the insects,” she said. “I’ve had some serious issues with insects. They lay their eggs, and the larvae eat their way through the artwork, and I have to clean it up and replace those things.”
Clean-up has included throwing away loads of material she had collected up through the years and putting pieces she believed were infested in deep freeze. Now she has a handle on the problem and has taken to adjusting the works on the occasions that she does show them in galleries.
“I’ll eliminate the things that are perishable and replace them with something else,” Steiner said. “For example, the salami and burritos were a lot of fun as throw rugs, but when I made a diorama out of that scene, I just left them out because it wasn’t possible to include them. There was also a slice of kiwi, which was a cushion on a chair, and I just replaced that with something else — a cookie or a cracker or something like that. I have some cookies in there that are maybe 10 years old, but they just sit there and mind their own business.”
One challenge Steiner handed herself for the fourth “Look-Alikes” book, “Around The World,” was to move away from the Western views she felt had dominated the books — she wanted to do something less familiar while still not totally alien. She felt not only would this widen the scope of her work, but also of her materials.
“I experimented with different things to see what looked good,” she said. “I had tons and tons of photographs of terraced farm fields, and that’s how I wound up doing Machu Picchu eventually — there’s terraced stuff there. It was really hard, I kept thinking maybe slices of meat loaf. I eventually started doing slices of bread with peanut butter on them.”
The book also offered some real challenges that caused her to go the extra mile in creating just the right look-alike for the scene. In one case, she had the difficult task of creating a camel. She used the leg off a baby doll she found by accident in a craft store.
And then there were even more complicated figures.
“I wanted to include Easter Island, but nothing looked like those big monoliths,” Steiner said. “I was looking at pictures of these monoliths and thinking ‘What can I do?’ The only thing they looked like to me was feet — giant feet. Finally, I made a mold of my foot and put an appropriately stone-looking sock over it. I managed to do it.”
In Steiner’s work, the relationship between the images and the viewers is the most important component — creating these visual riddles wouldn’t mean as much to her if there weren’t people out there to solve them. Despite this give and take between the artist and her audience, she doesn’t get the opportunity for real creative interaction often enough, so gallery shows give her the chance to see this integral part of the work in action.
“One of the nice things about having the original artwork shown is that I get to see people enjoying the work, whereas I don’t get to spy on people reading my book. That’s incredibly gratifying,” she said.
Doing the books, however, has been important for Steiner in regard to the works as art. Showing in a gallery is one thing, but she sees books — particularly children’s books — as an egalitarian form of spreading work for anyone to see. It’s a part of the art equation she would never give up and hopes more people embrace.
“Doing books is wonderful because you can do a piece and share it with people all over the world. There’s no way I could do original artwork that could be seen by as many people.,” she said.
“People love seeing the original artwork, but the books are a great way of sharing. And completely apart from my own work, I think that in general children’s books are one of the few areas where a lot of beautiful work is still being done and ordinary people can afford it. I’m a big believer in kid’s books.”
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