For the Love/Hate of Curry

A golden, aromatic spice blend that is prized by some and reviled by others, curry powder is a polarizing substance. Over the past five years I have used it as a dye, perfume, and pigment in my art practice. But I rarely eat the bottled stuff.

What, exactly, is curry? It is a delicious dish and an inadequate word. As food historian Thy Tran once told me, it is a word that falls short because it attempts to use the language of the colonizer to describe the many foods of the colonized. The first reference to curry powder was published in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1961), a book to aid British housewives in the particulars of maintaining a proper home in the colonies. I began to trace my own history through an alternative spice route. Being Indian and Japanese Colombian American, we ate curry all the time in our house. Indian cooks don’t usually use curry powder--but my mother, who is Colombian-born Japanese, made the kind that came out of a box. She mixed it with chicken, carrots and potatoes to create one of my favorite meals (coincidentally, the most popular brand of curry powder happens to be my initials, “S&B” and so I took it as a sign that I was meant to work with the material). Why does Japan’s #1 dish come from a package? Japan was introduced to curry by the British who made a roux of flour and fat with the spice blend. The Indian varieties? Those were more difficult to define. My father is from a small village outside of Kolkata. I still have no idea what is and isn’t a “curry.” Neither does my family. It’s just food in sauce – but it’s so much more.

After my first installation with curry powder in 2008, I searched the phrase “smells like curry” online. I suppose I expected to find a racist joke or two and a few recipes. Instead, I found thousands of entries referring to the way Indian people smelled. The one I will always remember was a posting on Yahoo! Answers:

Q: Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry.
A: Call the INS.

I became obsessed with this anonymous entry. For the first time I realized that race is constructed by more than what we see.

Over the next few years I sprinkled curry powder through the streets of Oakland, opened a Curry Institute (2011) at Whitman College, where visitors could chart their own Curry Cartography, and worked with perfumer Yosh Han to create a curry perfume called Gilt (2010) just because I wanted everyone to have the right to smell like curry. Eventually the spice pieces made their way onto the walls themselves.

Although my ingredients span the globe, I always source my materials from family-owned businesses. I had been purchasing ingredients from Bombay Bazaar, a hidden grocery store that had closed and re-opened in San Francisco’s wildly gentrifying Mission district. The last time I went in to say hello, the store had disappeared. Shelves, fluorescent lighting, and all. It is with the last batch of spices purchased at this shop that I created Dear Indian Grocery Store both in the bathroom of 18 Reasons in San Francisco and at the San Jose Museum of Art in November 2013. Feeling yet another loss in a city I recognize less and less, I wrote an open letter to the grocery store. This letter always accompanies the installation. As with my previous installations, the excess curry powder collected from the installation will be used to dye napkins and tablecloths for a sliding-scale community dinner. The curry powder is reserved for the art - it is rarely used in the cooking of the meal.

Most Indian cooks would never be caught with curry powder in their kitchens - it limits the complexity and variety of a dish. This powder is India concentrate. This is the myth we expect in Indian supermarkets, restaurants, and, yes, even people. But this complicated blend has also been transformed into the unique flavors of comfort all over the world.

For the Love/Hate of Curry

A golden, aromatic spice blend that is prized by some and reviled by others, curry powder is a polarizing substance. Over the past five years I have used it as a dye, perfume, and pigment in my art practice. But I rarely eat the bottled stuff.

What, exactly, is curry? It is a delicious dish and an inadequate word. As food historian Thy Tran once told me, it is a word that falls short because it attempts to use the language of the colonizer to describe the many foods of the colonized. The first reference to curry powder was published in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1961), a book to aid British housewives in the particulars of maintaining a proper home in the colonies. I began to trace my own history through an alternative spice route. Being Indian and Japanese Colombian American, we ate curry all the time in our house. Indian cooks don’t usually use curry powder--but my mother, who is Colombian-born Japanese, made the kind that came out of a box. She mixed it with chicken, carrots and potatoes to create one of my favorite meals (coincidentally, the most popular brand of curry powder happens to be my initials, “S&B” and so I took it as a sign that I was meant to work with the material). Why does Japan’s #1 dish come from a package? Japan was introduced to curry by the British who made a roux of flour and fat with the spice blend. The Indian varieties? Those were more difficult to define. My father is from a small village outside of Kolkata. I still have no idea what is and isn’t a “curry.” Neither does my family. It’s just food in sauce – but it’s so much more.

After my first installation with curry powder in 2008, I searched the phrase “smells like curry” online. I suppose I expected to find a racist joke or two and a few recipes. Instead, I found thousands of entries referring to the way Indian people smelled. The one I will always remember was a posting on Yahoo! Answers:

Q: Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry.
A: Call the INS.

I became obsessed with this anonymous entry. For the first time I realized that race is constructed by more than what we see.

Over the next few years I sprinkled curry powder through the streets of Oakland, opened a Curry Institute (2011) at Whitman College, where visitors could chart their own Curry Cartography, and worked with perfumer Yosh Han to create a curry perfume called Gilt (2010) just because I wanted everyone to have the right to smell like curry. Eventually the spice pieces made their way onto the walls themselves.

Although my ingredients span the globe, I always source my materials from family-owned businesses. I had been purchasing ingredients from Bombay Bazaar, a hidden grocery store that had closed and re-opened in San Francisco’s wildly gentrifying Mission district. The last time I went in to say hello, the store had disappeared. Shelves, fluorescent lighting, and all. It is with the last batch of spices purchased at this shop that I created Dear Indian Grocery Store both in the bathroom of 18 Reasons in San Francisco and at the San Jose Museum of Art in November 2013. Feeling yet another loss in a city I recognize less and less, I wrote an open letter to the grocery store. This letter always accompanies the installation. As with my previous installations, the excess curry powder collected from the installation will be used to dye napkins and tablecloths for a sliding-scale community dinner. The curry powder is reserved for the art - it is rarely used in the cooking of the meal.

Most Indian cooks would never be caught with curry powder in their kitchens - it limits the complexity and variety of a dish. This powder is India concentrate. This is the myth we expect in Indian supermarkets, restaurants, and, yes, even people. But this complicated blend has also been transformed into the unique flavors of comfort all over the world.

For the Love/Hate of Curry

A golden, aromatic spice blend that is prized by some and reviled by others, curry powder is a polarizing substance. Over the past five years I have used it as a dye, perfume, and pigment in my art practice. But I rarely eat the bottled stuff.

What, exactly, is curry? It is a delicious dish and an inadequate word. As food historian Thy Tran once told me, it is a word that falls short because it attempts to use the language of the colonizer to describe the many foods of the colonized. The first reference to curry powder was published in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1961), a book to aid British housewives in the particulars of maintaining a proper home in the colonies. I began to trace my own history through an alternative spice route. Being Indian and Japanese Colombian American, we ate curry all the time in our house. Indian cooks don’t usually use curry powder--but my mother, who is Colombian-born Japanese, made the kind that came out of a box. She mixed it with chicken, carrots and potatoes to create one of my favorite meals (coincidentally, the most popular brand of curry powder happens to be my initials, “S&B” and so I took it as a sign that I was meant to work with the material). Why does Japan’s #1 dish come from a package? Japan was introduced to curry by the British who made a roux of flour and fat with the spice blend. The Indian varieties? Those were more difficult to define. My father is from a small village outside of Kolkata. I still have no idea what is and isn’t a “curry.” Neither does my family. It’s just food in sauce – but it’s so much more.

After my first installation with curry powder in 2008, I searched the phrase “smells like curry” online. I suppose I expected to find a racist joke or two and a few recipes. Instead, I found thousands of entries referring to the way Indian people smelled. The one I will always remember was a posting on Yahoo! Answers:

Q: Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry.
A: Call the INS.

I became obsessed with this anonymous entry. For the first time I realized that race is constructed by more than what we see.

Over the next few years I sprinkled curry powder through the streets of Oakland, opened a Curry Institute (2011) at Whitman College, where visitors could chart their own Curry Cartography, and worked with perfumer Yosh Han to create a curry perfume called Gilt (2010) just because I wanted everyone to have the right to smell like curry. Eventually the spice pieces made their way onto the walls themselves.

Although my ingredients span the globe, I always source my materials from family-owned businesses. I had been purchasing ingredients from Bombay Bazaar, a hidden grocery store that had closed and re-opened in San Francisco’s wildly gentrifying Mission district. The last time I went in to say hello, the store had disappeared. Shelves, fluorescent lighting, and all. It is with the last batch of spices purchased at this shop that I created Dear Indian Grocery Store both in the bathroom of 18 Reasons in San Francisco and at the San Jose Museum of Art in November 2013. Feeling yet another loss in a city I recognize less and less, I wrote an open letter to the grocery store. This letter always accompanies the installation. As with my previous installations, the excess curry powder collected from the installation will be used to dye napkins and tablecloths for a sliding-scale community dinner. The curry powder is reserved for the art - it is rarely used in the cooking of the meal.

Most Indian cooks would never be caught with curry powder in their kitchens - it limits the complexity and variety of a dish. This powder is India concentrate. This is the myth we expect in Indian supermarkets, restaurants, and, yes, even people. But this complicated blend has also been transformed into the unique flavors of comfort all over the world.

For the Love/Hate of Curry

A golden, aromatic spice blend that is prized by some and reviled by others, curry powder is a polarizing substance. Over the past five years I have used it as a dye, perfume, and pigment in my art practice. But I rarely eat the bottled stuff.

What, exactly, is curry? It is a delicious dish and an inadequate word. As food historian Thy Tran once told me, it is a word that falls short because it attempts to use the language of the colonizer to describe the many foods of the colonized. The first reference to curry powder was published in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1961), a book to aid British housewives in the particulars of maintaining a proper home in the colonies. I began to trace my own history through an alternative spice route. Being Indian and Japanese Colombian American, we ate curry all the time in our house. Indian cooks don’t usually use curry powder--but my mother, who is Colombian-born Japanese, made the kind that came out of a box. She mixed it with chicken, carrots and potatoes to create one of my favorite meals (coincidentally, the most popular brand of curry powder happens to be my initials, “S&B” and so I took it as a sign that I was meant to work with the material). Why does Japan’s #1 dish come from a package? Japan was introduced to curry by the British who made a roux of flour and fat with the spice blend. The Indian varieties? Those were more difficult to define. My father is from a small village outside of Kolkata. I still have no idea what is and isn’t a “curry.” Neither does my family. It’s just food in sauce – but it’s so much more.

After my first installation with curry powder in 2008, I searched the phrase “smells like curry” online. I suppose I expected to find a racist joke or two and a few recipes. Instead, I found thousands of entries referring to the way Indian people smelled. The one I will always remember was a posting on Yahoo! Answers:

Q: Help, my neighbor’s house smells like curry.
A: Call the INS.

I became obsessed with this anonymous entry. For the first time I realized that race is constructed by more than what we see.

Over the next few years I sprinkled curry powder through the streets of Oakland, opened a Curry Institute (2011) at Whitman College, where visitors could chart their own Curry Cartography, and worked with perfumer Yosh Han to create a curry perfume called Gilt (2010) just because I wanted everyone to have the right to smell like curry. Eventually the spice pieces made their way onto the walls themselves.

Although my ingredients span the globe, I always source my materials from family-owned businesses. I had been purchasing ingredients from Bombay Bazaar, a hidden grocery store that had closed and re-opened in San Francisco’s wildly gentrifying Mission district. The last time I went in to say hello, the store had disappeared. Shelves, fluorescent lighting, and all. It is with the last batch of spices purchased at this shop that I created Dear Indian Grocery Store both in the bathroom of 18 Reasons in San Francisco and at the San Jose Museum of Art in November 2013. Feeling yet another loss in a city I recognize less and less, I wrote an open letter to the grocery store. This letter always accompanies the installation. As with my previous installations, the excess curry powder collected from the installation will be used to dye napkins and tablecloths for a sliding-scale community dinner. The curry powder is reserved for the art - it is rarely used in the cooking of the meal.

Most Indian cooks would never be caught with curry powder in their kitchens - it limits the complexity and variety of a dish. This powder is India concentrate. This is the myth we expect in Indian supermarkets, restaurants, and, yes, even people. But this complicated blend has also been transformed into the unique flavors of comfort all over the world.

I’m interested in the human experience, symbiosis, and the vicissitudes of the interaction between the work and the viewer/consumer. In the construct of a hypereality and the use of metaphors and parallels, I try to seduce my audience, playing on their expectations and assumptions based on their preconceived notions. Through the lure and allure, I pull the viewer in hoping that their experience and understanding of the work will unfold into a dialectic gaze.

I’m interested in the human experience, symbiosis, and the vicissitudes of the interaction between the work and the viewer/consumer. In the construct of a hypereality and the use of metaphors and parallels, I try to seduce my audience, playing on their expectations and assumptions based on their preconceived notions. Through the lure and allure, I pull the viewer in hoping that their experience and understanding of the work will unfold into a dialectic gaze.

I’m interested in the human experience, symbiosis, and the vicissitudes of the interaction between the work and the viewer/consumer. In the construct of a hypereality and the use of metaphors and parallels, I try to seduce my audience, playing on their expectations and assumptions based on their preconceived notions. Through the lure and allure, I pull the viewer in hoping that their experience and understanding of the work will unfold into a dialectic gaze.

False Food: A Metaphor for Survival

The volunteer from the Monterey Bay Aquarium held up a jar for the television audience to see. The jar was filled with colorful pieces of plastic collected from the belly of a dead albatross on Midway Atoll. Mistaking plastic debris for food in the Pacific Gyre has become a common occurrence, resulting in the death of countless albatross each year. Deceived by “empty calories,” the adult albatross feed their chicks harmful plastic, resulting in the same fatal outcome.

When it comes to plastic, the biggest “landfill” isn’t on land but in our oceans—and if our oceans are in trouble, we’re in trouble. Gyres of plastic dangerously impact the food chain. Unlike organic debris, plastic does not biodegrade. It eventually degrades into smaller and smaller particles until it becomes a soup of molecular plastic. At this size, these molecules enter the food chain and we inadvertently become the albatross. We live in a disposable consumer society. What we throw away we ultimately consume.

In western society, we tend to mistake the excessive consumption of material goods for sustenance. Plastic is often designed for “single-use,” but, by nature, every molecule ever developed is still with us today. My intent as a photographer is for my work to be engaging and nourishing. My goal is to inspire viewers to look more deeply. A good photograph can compel the viewer to want to know the narrative. Negative images can cause people to feel helpless and overwhelmed; responding from the reptilian brain, where clear and ethical thinking is not possible. In contrast, I believe aesthetics allows the viewer to become engaged with the narrative.

How can we learn to live with chaos and turn it into something beautiful, sustainable, and nourishing? This is a query worth resolution. The transformation of plastic waste in False Food is not only an act of defiance; it’s an act of inspiration. If we want to change what we recoil from, we must consider the consciousness that has created what we see. False Food seeks to redeem hope, beauty, and nourishment.

Special thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for generously providing the plastic artifacts used in making these images.

False Food: A Metaphor for Survival

The volunteer from the Monterey Bay Aquarium held up a jar for the television audience to see. The jar was filled with colorful pieces of plastic collected from the belly of a dead albatross on Midway Atoll. Mistaking plastic debris for food in the Pacific Gyre has become a common occurrence, resulting in the death of countless albatross each year. Deceived by “empty calories,” the adult albatross feed their chicks harmful plastic, resulting in the same fatal outcome.

When it comes to plastic, the biggest “landfill” isn’t on land but in our oceans—and if our oceans are in trouble, we’re in trouble. Gyres of plastic dangerously impact the food chain. Unlike organic debris, plastic does not biodegrade. It eventually degrades into smaller and smaller particles until it becomes a soup of molecular plastic. At this size, these molecules enter the food chain and we inadvertently become the albatross. We live in a disposable consumer society. What we throw away we ultimately consume.

In western society, we tend to mistake the excessive consumption of material goods for sustenance. Plastic is often designed for “single-use,” but, by nature, every molecule ever developed is still with us today. My intent as a photographer is for my work to be engaging and nourishing. My goal is to inspire viewers to look more deeply. A good photograph can compel the viewer to want to know the narrative. Negative images can cause people to feel helpless and overwhelmed; responding from the reptilian brain, where clear and ethical thinking is not possible. In contrast, I believe aesthetics allows the viewer to become engaged with the narrative.

How can we learn to live with chaos and turn it into something beautiful, sustainable, and nourishing? This is a query worth resolution. The transformation of plastic waste in False Food is not only an act of defiance; it’s an act of inspiration. If we want to change what we recoil from, we must consider the consciousness that has created what we see. False Food seeks to redeem hope, beauty, and nourishment.

Special thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for generously providing the plastic artifacts used in making these images.

False Food: A Metaphor for Survival

The volunteer from the Monterey Bay Aquarium held up a jar for the television audience to see. The jar was filled with colorful pieces of plastic collected from the belly of a dead albatross on Midway Atoll. Mistaking plastic debris for food in the Pacific Gyre has become a common occurrence, resulting in the death of countless albatross each year. Deceived by “empty calories,” the adult albatross feed their chicks harmful plastic, resulting in the same fatal outcome.

When it comes to plastic, the biggest “landfill” isn’t on land but in our oceans—and if our oceans are in trouble, we’re in trouble. Gyres of plastic dangerously impact the food chain. Unlike organic debris, plastic does not biodegrade. It eventually degrades into smaller and smaller particles until it becomes a soup of molecular plastic. At this size, these molecules enter the food chain and we inadvertently become the albatross. We live in a disposable consumer society. What we throw away we ultimately consume.

In western society, we tend to mistake the excessive consumption of material goods for sustenance. Plastic is often designed for “single-use,” but, by nature, every molecule ever developed is still with us today. My intent as a photographer is for my work to be engaging and nourishing. My goal is to inspire viewers to look more deeply. A good photograph can compel the viewer to want to know the narrative. Negative images can cause people to feel helpless and overwhelmed; responding from the reptilian brain, where clear and ethical thinking is not possible. In contrast, I believe aesthetics allows the viewer to become engaged with the narrative.

How can we learn to live with chaos and turn it into something beautiful, sustainable, and nourishing? This is a query worth resolution. The transformation of plastic waste in False Food is not only an act of defiance; it’s an act of inspiration. If we want to change what we recoil from, we must consider the consciousness that has created what we see. False Food seeks to redeem hope, beauty, and nourishment.

Special thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for generously providing the plastic artifacts used in making these images.