Food=Need OCAD U

Event Poster
Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - 11:15pm to Thursday, March 6, 2014 - 2:00am

Food=Need OCAD U Exhibition will run from February 18th - March 5th, Learning Zone, 113 McCaul Street, Level 1

A multidisciplinary art event exploring issues of food poverty and insecurity

Food is a basic human need. It shapes desires and obsessions and yields many kinds of enjoyment and pain. One can explore food from diverse perspectives seeing it both as an object produced and consumed and also as the means and symbol of our human relations. The diversity of what we eat (and don’t eat) and of how food is produced and shared shapes cultures, communities, and nations. Refracted through language, culture, and media, food is a central lens for exploring the patterns of our interaction. Hunger, as an index of poverty and of environmental disaster, provides a reversed lens with which we can explore justice and ethics. How we get what we eat, from near and far, is basic to ways of inhabiting places on the earth and relating to each other. Food=Need OCAD U is an event that explores these issues and their effect on the lives and work of artists and designers.

6:15-7:45 Film Screening and Panel Discussion
The evening begins in Central Hall, Room 230 of 100 McCaul, with a welcome by OCAD U Art and Social Change Faculty Andrea Fatona. WIA projects’ feminist artist-researchers Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee will introduce the young Toronto filmmakers Naked Eye, Diana Piruzevska and Anlina Rana, who will speak to and screen the film Food=Need. This short documentary film based on the Food=Need community performance art event curated by WIA projects in the Fall of 2013. Watch the trailer

The screening will be followed by a panel (composed of OCAD U student and OCADSU Free Lunch coordinator Che-Chi Liu, OCAD U student and Food Not Bomb Toronto member Shirley Ceravolo, and Greenest City Artist, community facilitator and museum educator Cath Campbell) which will lead a OCAD community discussion on the politics of food insecurity and the value of creating sustainable food-linked projects. Free popcorn!

7:45-9:00 Workshop & Reception
The evening's events will continue in the OCAD U Library's Learning Zone, Level 1 of 113 McCaul, with a closing reception for the Food=Need Exhibition where we will celebrate the event with food and further discourse. The Food=Need Exhibit is a multimedia installation featuring poster designs and booklets from the students in Audrey Hudson's Think Tank courses. The creative responses from the Think Tank courses address food availability; food access and food use around the subjects of: food co-ops, gardening, nutrition, schools & food, labelling food, art/design food activism, narratives of food, and community development projects. The Video work from Pam Patterson's Life Studies course address sustainability and food insecurity in and through diverse populations and people.

Mary "Mack" Tremonte, OCAD U IAMD graduate student and Just Seeds Collective member, will lead participants in a silkscreen workshop so that they may come away from the event with printed tote bags that will facilitate further awareness and discourse in the future.

FREE. Suggested donation: Non-perishable food items for the Starving Artist Pantry, the OCAD Student Union's Food Bank.

Photo credit: James Looker

OCAD U Sustainability Initiatives, in collaboration with the OCADU Student Union and other OCAD U departments, is proud to announce the 2nd Sustainability Month at OCADU (sMarch). During the month of March (4th to 29th) we will celebrate a range of activities on campus, like Food=Need OCADU, that highlight and acknowledge student, faculty and staff sustainability initiatives and provide the means to live, think and act sustainably.

Venue & Address: 
Central Hall 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario
Website: 
http://www.facebook.com/events/221230268082546
Cost: 
Free