By: Lauren Newkirk Maynard
Stefani Bardin loves the meat of controversy and the crunch of critique. A self-described restaurant junkie, she's also a filmmaker, video artist, media scholar, teacher and former food writer who pops up around town wherever there's good art, good eats and interesting ideas. In her art, in her classroom and on her plate, Bardin explores how food incites and inspires people.
On one particular spring Saturday, she admits she's far too amped up on caffeine.
"I like to spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about food," she says, after making a requisite beeline to Five Points Bakery to stock up on their housemade organic brown sugar and ooh and ahh over everything else. Bardin urged me to buy a warm loaf of whole-wheat focaccia. I'm glad she did.
"I just love this place," she says, greeting owner Melissa Gardner at the checkout. "This type of grassroots enterprise is what has always made Buffalo a good food town, and is making it a better one."
At the University at Buffalo, Bardin teaches a seminar in the Department of Media Study called Food and Emerging Media. She has also organized a free lecture series of the same name, and has invited scholars, artists, farmers and others from across North America to come to Buffalo this spring and share their ideas about global food systems and how new models of sustainability, social networking and emerging forms of media and technology can help re-imagine the concept of gastronomy--the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does to us.
Bardin wants everyone to come get a taste.
"I made the series open to the public because I saw how uninformed my students initially were about the dangers of our dysfunctional food systems, and watched them catch fire and want to learn more," she says. "I wanted to start a meaningful dialogue about what makes food so central to everything we do, and how we need to find better ways of feeding ourselves."
Growing up in Edison, New Jersey, Bardin says that her earliest food memory was the classic children's book Bread and Jam for Francis. "I loved all the explicit descriptions of what Albert and Francis packed for lunch, and how they ate everything so it all came out even," she says. "That's me, an equal opportunity eater."
But it was in her parent's Jewish kitchen that Bardin developed a taste for good food. "My parents are wonderful cooks," she says. At first she resisted her mother's encouragement to get into the kitchen, but eventually she started making layered salads, then meals for friends in college and became the "only person who cooked" at George Washington University. It was on the streets of Washington D.C., she says, "where my culinary world opened." When traveling or living abroad, she says food is how she negotiates a new locale or culture.
With her former husband, also an academic, Bardin began traveling the country and tasted life in places as diverse as New Orleans, central Maine, and Wyoming.
Wyoming?
"Yeah, I know," she laughs. "What could possibly be there? But it turned out to be a great opportunity." When they settled in Laramie, Bardin found nothing especially culinary except one "fantastic" natural-foods store. No restaurants. No takeout. So she purchased ingredients online or at that one local gem, and got cooking. "I made everything myself--sushi, bread, my own garam masala. I cut my teeth."
Bardin continued collecting academic degrees in creative writing, poetics and media. Armed with theory and bursting with creativity, she soon began using food as a form of self-expression.
Around the time she received her MFA in Media Arts from UB in 2008, Bardin began a series of multimedia projects loosely called "The Pharmacology of Taste."
In shows at the CEPA Gallery, the Kenan Center in Lockport, she has explored the role of junk food in contemporary society, staged a parody of a Food Network-style cooking show, and used a refrigerator as a kind of camera lens for exploring the relationship between technology and food consumption. She has even pumped artificial scents into gallery spaces in order to help the audience "explore the relationship of manufactured smells and their association with our memories of taste."
"My intent was to have people experience the exhibit using more of their senses," she explains, adding that early on in her studies, she was amazed and then motivated to discover that there were no artists, scientists or philosophers investigating how artificial flavoring affects our concept of reality. "No one was @#%! writing about it!"
In addition to the Food and Emerging Media series, Bardin is currently working on two multimedia art pieces: "Meat Your Maker," a three-channel installation (the three channels being video, audio, and scent) comparing traditional and biodynamic slaughterhouses, and "Amaizing Grains," a display of images that illustrates the pervasive use of corn found in more than 2,500 everyday grocery-store items. She is extending her experiments with multi-sensory art as curator of a two-year long installation series called "Eyes of the Skin: Art of the Senses" at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, to be held later this year through 2012.
Keep an eye (or a taste bud or two) out for her work. It offers the uncanny taste of something once familiar, now made shockingly new.
The last talk of the Food and Emerging Media Speaker Series feature Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin, professors of architecture technology from CUNY and co-founders of Fluxxlab, on April 20 at 5:30 at 301 Crosby Hall on UB's South Campus.
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Lauren Newkirk Maynard is a writer in the Office of University Communications at UB and a freelance food writer living in Buffalo.
Photo Credit: Douglas Levere and the University at Buffalo
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Stefani Bardin loves the meat of controversy and the crunch of critique. A self-described restaurant junkie, she's also a filmmaker, video artist, media scholar, teacher and former food writer who pops up around town wherever there's good art, good eats and interesting ideas. In her art, in her classroom and on her plate, Bardin explores how food incites and inspires people.
On one particular spring Saturday, she admits she's far too amped up on caffeine.
"I like to spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about food," she says, after making a requisite beeline to Five Points Bakery to stock up on their housemade organic brown sugar and ooh and ahh over everything else. Bardin urged me to buy a warm loaf of whole-wheat focaccia. I'm glad she did.
"I just love this place," she says, greeting owner Melissa Gardner at the checkout. "This type of grassroots enterprise is what has always made Buffalo a good food town, and is making it a better one."
At the University at Buffalo, Bardin teaches a seminar in the Department of Media Study called Food and Emerging Media. She has also organized a free lecture series of the same name, and has invited scholars, artists, farmers and others from across North America to come to Buffalo this spring and share their ideas about global food systems and how new models of sustainability, social networking and emerging forms of media and technology can help re-imagine the concept of gastronomy--the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does to us.
Bardin wants everyone to come get a taste.
"I made the series open to the public because I saw how uninformed my students initially were about the dangers of our dysfunctional food systems, and watched them catch fire and want to learn more," she says. "I wanted to start a meaningful dialogue about what makes food so central to everything we do, and how we need to find better ways of feeding ourselves."
Growing up in Edison, New Jersey, Bardin says that her earliest food memory was the classic children's book Bread and Jam for Francis. "I loved all the explicit descriptions of what Albert and Francis packed for lunch, and how they ate everything so it all came out even," she says. "That's me, an equal opportunity eater."
But it was in her parent's Jewish kitchen that Bardin developed a taste for good food. "My parents are wonderful cooks," she says. At first she resisted her mother's encouragement to get into the kitchen, but eventually she started making layered salads, then meals for friends in college and became the "only person who cooked" at George Washington University. It was on the streets of Washington D.C., she says, "where my culinary world opened." When traveling or living abroad, she says food is how she negotiates a new locale or culture.
With her former husband, also an academic, Bardin began traveling the country and tasted life in places as diverse as New Orleans, central Maine, and Wyoming.
Wyoming?
"Yeah, I know," she laughs. "What could possibly be there? But it turned out to be a great opportunity." When they settled in Laramie, Bardin found nothing especially culinary except one "fantastic" natural-foods store. No restaurants. No takeout. So she purchased ingredients online or at that one local gem, and got cooking. "I made everything myself--sushi, bread, my own garam masala. I cut my teeth."
Bardin continued collecting academic degrees in creative writing, poetics and media. Armed with theory and bursting with creativity, she soon began using food as a form of self-expression.
Around the time she received her MFA in Media Arts from UB in 2008, Bardin began a series of multimedia projects loosely called "The Pharmacology of Taste."
In shows at the CEPA Gallery, the Kenan Center in Lockport, she has explored the role of junk food in contemporary society, staged a parody of a Food Network-style cooking show, and used a refrigerator as a kind of camera lens for exploring the relationship between technology and food consumption. She has even pumped artificial scents into gallery spaces in order to help the audience "explore the relationship of manufactured smells and their association with our memories of taste."
"My intent was to have people experience the exhibit using more of their senses," she explains, adding that early on in her studies, she was amazed and then motivated to discover that there were no artists, scientists or philosophers investigating how artificial flavoring affects our concept of reality. "No one was @#%! writing about it!"
In addition to the Food and Emerging Media series, Bardin is currently working on two multimedia art pieces: "Meat Your Maker," a three-channel installation (the three channels being video, audio, and scent) comparing traditional and biodynamic slaughterhouses, and "Amaizing Grains," a display of images that illustrates the pervasive use of corn found in more than 2,500 everyday grocery-store items. She is extending her experiments with multi-sensory art as curator of a two-year long installation series called "Eyes of the Skin: Art of the Senses" at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, to be held later this year through 2012.
Keep an eye (or a taste bud or two) out for her work. It offers the uncanny taste of something once familiar, now made shockingly new.
The last talk of the Food and Emerging Media Speaker Series feature Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin, professors of architecture technology from CUNY and co-founders of Fluxxlab, on April 20 at 5:30 at 301 Crosby Hall on UB's South Campus.
-----
Lauren Newkirk Maynard is a writer in the Office of University Communications at UB and a freelance food writer living in Buffalo.
Photo Credit: Douglas Levere and the University at Buffalo
I loved Bread and Jam for Francis