Porous Color (project in process!)
A few months ago, while walking to my studio in Brooklyn, I stopped dead in my tracks: bright red liquid was gushing down the cobblestone street. While dark in hue, the color was glowing and bright, like a child’s sucking candy. This mysterious, translucent substance collected in cracks and potholes, creating bright red streams and pools of candy apples. Flies and bees were feasting on the delectable juice. It smelled sweet yet putrid. Was this liquid the nectar of the gods? Or rotten blood? The longer I looked, the more confused I became. (Should I taste it?)
Through conversations with neighbors, I discovered that the liquid was the runoff from a maraschino cherry factory that produces fourteen million pounds of cherries a year. Soon, I began to stop by the factory every time I went to the studio. Once I knew to look for them, I saw cherries and cherry stems decorating the sidewalk outside the factory every morning. And liquid — lots of it.
This strange red substance knows no bounds. In 2010, a local apiary reported their bees to be glowing red. Their honey stomachs, which typically hold pockets of amber colored liquid, instead held a garish bright red. Soon, of course their honeycomb was red too, bursting with gallons of cough syrup. The red bees multiplied, and soon apiaries across the Hudson River also reported this bizarre phenomena.
Since this odd discovery, I have become obsessed with the movement of color. Through food and clothing production, color goes through awkward cycles of translation and transmutation. For the cherries, they were plucked off a farmed tree, bleached (their color was completely removed, leaving a pale yellow fruit), and then, ironically enough, artificially dyed back to red. This color is applied onto the cherries like a lipstick or an artifice. I was pulled in by this sexy, irresistibly red hue, only to be tricked. But perhaps it is important to remember that color is a chameleon - it changes its identity no matter where it is, lying to us constantly. As Joseph Albers writes in “Interaction of Color,” “in order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”
In 2018, on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, sparrows were reported turning pink. A similar tale to the cherry-colored bees, these birds were caught eating the wrong food. These birds share an ecosystem with many animals, among them salmon. Salmon, much like other animals, survive off of a diet that follows the logic of color. They hunt for food that is bright pink, collecting rose colored tiny crustaceans. Their salmon-pink color derives from their diet, and in fact, different regions' salmons are slightly different colors due to the various crustaceans in their areas. Overtime, people have come to associate healthy salmon with a rich pink color. We crave it. If it isn’t that color, we will intuit that it’s not suitable for eating. However, through factory farming, these fish are forced to eat non-living food, and thus turn gray. To counteract that, we are adding our own pink color back into the fish through colored pellets. Thanks to biotech companies like DSM, farmers can even select what color salmon they want to raise through an accordion of pink Pantone swatches.
Around the world, similar tales are occurring : cycles of reproduction, consumption, and desire are getting entangled upon each other. In the artist collective Cooking Sections piece entitled “Salmon: A Red Herring,” they highlight a series of these cases, examining the ways in which our perception of color is evolving with our changing planet. It is a fascinating study of mimicry and deception - what it means for something to be “synthetic,” and what it means to be “real.”
However, what I am most fascinated by is how this close study of color makes disparate elements within our earth’s system feel closer to each other. Famously, colors mix. Over the next phases of this research, I will explore color as an element in motion. A sticky substance. A way to make visible the interconnectedness of all our earth systems, and how through our bodies, color can be filtered and leaked onto our neighbors.
