TAKE a close look at these two pictures. Are they real bananas, or are they art? Or has installation artist Adam Veikkanen cleverly traversed the boundaries of both art and food?  

When I received an  email from Heather Brenchley, the brains behind this exhibition, announcing that “food trumps art,”  I simply had to dash around to the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in  Manuka to find out what was going on, and I failed the test on two counts.

For though I worked out that Veikkanen’s big bananas on the floor couldn’t be real, I wasn’t too sure about  the ones on the wall.

Brenchley’s reaction to my confusion was sheer delight, after all, she sees this show as  “ike a forum for discussion,” but there was more to come. After she invited me to check out some poppy seed sweet sticks with natural beetroot deep, arranged artistically on a table with other delicacies like honeycomb chilli balls and chocolate, I suspected I might have been eating art. This was  a suspicion later confirmed when I read the list of works and saw that the tasting menu was indeed another kind of artwork.

Brenchley assures me that there will be similar arty food throughout the exhibition.

Moving on, I was further challenged by glass artist, Christine Atkins’ video work exploring the interplay between glass and light through refraction, and once again floored by a question, was further bowl of small glass balls intended to be looked at, or felt? The answer is the latter.

Brenchley had obviously been busy. As well as preparing the delectables and  covering the walls with cutouts from food magazines that helped raise  exhibition’s premise that food is more desirable, more important and more necessary than art, she had installed a series of  her own untitled prints on  the furthest wall.

As well, jewellery artist Amy Fiveash, working in reason, titanium, aluminium and stainless steel, had installed two beautiful necklace- works on the wall.

I was about to fail the test. Two black works that I assumed were some kind of conceptual art turned out to be black bullets on which, throughout the exhibition, viewers will be able to vote on their decided preference: food or art?

If you’re planning on eating in Manuka, it might be a good idea to get the taste buds going by looking at, feeling, and even eating some art at the CCAS.

“Food trumps art” at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Furneaux Manuka until December 2.

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