Event

The Land of a Million CerealsPost an Event »

Mission 17

June 6 - August 3, 2008

Info

http://www.mission17.org/
(510) 467-4818

2111 Mission Street Suite 401 San Francisco, CA 94110

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Opening Reception Friday, June 6th, 6-9pm If we are what we eat, a significant degree of our who we are – at least, in this country – is cereal. In America, cereal is the most popular breakfast food and the third most popular product in the supermarket altogether – after only soda and cereal’s constant counterpart, milk. In his up-coming show at MISSION 17, Ryan Alexiev explores this centrality of cereal to our constitution. But cereal, for Alexiev, functions as more than merely a foodstuff. His engagement with cereal is informed by his appreciation of its history and continuing importance as a paradigmatic consumer product. Since the advent of cereal in the early Twentieth-Century, the four basic grains – wheat, corn, rice, and oats – have consistently been packaged and promoted in a seemingly endless variety of products. Currently there are 400 different kinds of cereals on the market, which ultimately are distinguished by little more than their ad campaigns. The substance of cereal is, in this light, ideology. And, when we consume it, we ingest more than merely calories. We literally incorporate a sense of who we are – not only through our identification with an image on the face of a carboard box, but furthermore, for Alexiev, as rational subjects who imagine ourselves as free to choose. Alexiev examines this ideology of free choice in American consumer culture, so vividly manifested in cereal, by presenting it from the vantage of a Bulgarian peasant. Drawing upon the history of his own family, he tells the story of a rustic who flees Communist oppression and comes to America: The Land of a Million Cereals. As if viewed through the eyes of this Second-World son of the soil, the works in the show exaggerate the aesthetics of cereal and its packaging. Everything is ecstatic: promising total, immediate, gratification in a pallet of fluorescent pinks, yellows, and blues, and – perhaps most importantly – an endless variety of what ultimately amounts to nothing but more of the same. The show includes prints, sculpture, video, and drawings. And Alexiev, in the role of the peasant, does battle with Frankenberry, who wields the powerful “golden spoon,” – free in every box!