Exhibition: Chocolate or Cheese?

A two-day intervention in which SFN tracked the gastronomic preferences of mice and men, inspired by a piece of nibbled chocolate…

EXHIBITION was a six-month project that took place in a vacant shopfront at 211 Elizabeth St in New York City. Artists were invited to intervene, rearrange and re-imagine their designated space in the gallery (chosen with the roll of a dice) for two days – a process which happened continuously over the entire exhibition period.

After spending some time in the space, we noticed that a mouse (or, as it turned out – mice) had been eating a piece of chocolate (part of a previous artist’s installation.) This triggered our idea for recreating the gallery space on a mouse-scale in an attempt to find out whether the mouse/mice-in-residence preferred cheese over chocolate. We dusted flour on the floor of our miniature gallery as a strategy for tracking its footprints, and therefore its preference. A time lapse camera was used to capture night time activities in the space. Results were inconclusive however, the camera did record the movements of two mice running amok in the space one evening.

We ran a similar experiment with humans who entered the gallery space, providing the option of free chocolate or cheese and asking them the following question:

if you were to give up chocolate or cheese for life, which one would it be?

Those polled preferred to sample chocolate when given the choice at that moment. However, in the long term, cheese was the clear choice.

Exhibition initiatiors: Elena Bajo, Eric Anglès, Jakob Schillinger, Nathalie Anglès, Warren Neidich.

Participating artists: Jon Cuyson, Second Hand, Georgia Sagri, Matteo Norzi and Hilario Isola, Ania Diakoff, Diana Artus, Klara Hobza, Ana Prvački and Boško Bošković, Filip Gilissen, Olivier Babin, Trong Gia Gnuyen, Scott Kiernan, Eve K Tremblay, Debra Warner, Patricia Reed, Amy Patton, Alex Singh, B. Wurtz, Scale Free Network, XLXS, Liz Linden, Christina Linden, Mark Tribe, Sophie Macpherson, Jeff Perkins and João Simões, Indira Sylvia Belissop, Daniel Feinberg / SEMITES Magazine, Liz Magic Laser, with Robert Graner, Debo Eilers, Paul Pagk, with Adrian Dannatt and Eric Mitchell performing, Shinsuke Aso, Gabriel Martinez, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Karl Lydén and Rebecka Thor, Rey Akdogan, David Baumflek, David Levine, Ben Bunch and Sarrita Hunn, Maria Chavez, Marcella Faustini and Donna Huanca, An Te Liu, Loretta Fahrenholz, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, Jason Loebs and Patrick Price, Alexis Knowlton, Emily Mast and Evan Mast, Sean Raspeth, Adina Popescu, with Michael Portnoy performing, Stefan Saffer, Lucy Gallum, Bettina Hutschek, Brian Block, Ronnie Bass, Caecilia Tripp with Sham el Nessim, Eiju Kawasaki, Emah Fox, Karyn and Brian, Yvette Mattern, Susanne Schuricht, Erik Smith, Jen Liu with Maria Chavez, Tyler Coburn and Scott Kiernan, Rodney LaTourelle, Mathieu Copeland

Links:

Exhibition Website

Exhibition: Chocolate or Cheese?

Exhibitions // Performance