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Caffè Museo, SFMOMA

December 30 - February 2, 2011

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151 Third Street San Francisco, CA 94103

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Cauliflower in Plastic, Victoria Mimiaga

Artist Reception: Thursday, December 30, 2010 6:30-8pm SFMOMA Artists Gallery is pleased to present Food in Plastic, a collection of paintings by California artist Victoria Mimiaga. Through the traditional style of still life painting, the work for this exhibition explores the abundant and sometimes superfluous use of plastic packaging in the food industry. In this debut presentation, the artist will present twenty oil-painted works on canvas and board, including select award-winning pieces from the series. Food in Plastic will be exhibited at Caffe Museo, inside the SFMOMA, at 151 Third Street in San Francisco. The artist’s reception will be held on Thursday, December 30, 2010 from 6:30 – 8pm. The exhibit runs from December 23, 2010 to February 1, 2011. For Food in Plastic, Mimiaga captures the ephemeral nature of reflectivity while portraying the humor in the perfunctory uselessness of plastic receptacles. Cucumbers are Individually shrink-wrapped, sliced apples are packaged twice in plastic, a molded plastic half shell is manufactured for half a Bundt cake. These containers inevitably call into question the banal acceptance, redundancy and environmental implications of the overuse of plastic packaging. From the artist’s statement: “From thin gauge thermoform trays to seal tear bags, the use of plastic packaging in the food industry has undergone a renaissance. In supermarkets, corner bodegas and organic food stores, there are new and creative uses of plastic packaging – in some cases offering little more than heightened protection where none is needed. Items such as bananas, already covered in Nature’s skin, are further enveloped in a silky sheen of polymer. Over the past decade, Victoria Mimiaga has been struck by this proliferation of plastic in the food industry. The traditional still life with fruit, fish or vegetable, a time-honored artistic subject, must now account for this new, man-made offshoot. And while plastic-wrapped food presents an aesthetic of its own, lying beneath the surface is the alarming reality of how this added waste material impacts the rest of the natural world.” VICTORIA MIMIAGA was born and raised in Honolulu Hawaii. She attended Punahou High School and received a Bachelor's degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her formal training includes four years at the Honolulu Academy of Art, two years at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, four years at College of Marin and Master workshops with internationally known artists Jove Wang, Peggy Kroll Roberts, Skip Whitcomb and Randall Sexton. A former jewelry and furniture designer, Victoria has had work featured at Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores. Victoria's Pet portraits and Plein Aire paintings have appeared in two national publications, Victoria Magazine and Northern California Home and Design. She has received numerous awards for her paintings from 2000 – 2010, including First Place Northern California Artists, Best of Show Indian Valley Artists, and First Place Mill Valley Paint Off. Victoria's current work explores the reflective qualities of the figure in water, especially pool water, where the values remain high key and fully saturated. She continues her series "Food in Plastic" where she chronicles the vast array of needless, redundant and amusing plastic receptacles used in packaging food. ABOUT SFMOMA ARTISTS GALLERY The SFMOMA Artists Gallery features a dynamic exhibition program and represents Bay Area artists at all stages of their careers. As a nonprofit gallery, we make sure that the majority of our proceeds from rentals and sales go directly to our artists. The remainder supports exhibitions and educational programming at the museum.