I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For…Smoked Salmon and Bagel Ice Cream?

By JENR 04.15.2008 imt

Yes, the headline above is true.

Tonight I braved an interactive food-based art happening to see my friend Miwa Koizumi perform at the Umami festival in SoHo. The festival, which runs through April 18, is pretty intriguing stuff. Lifted from its website:

“Umami was created as a meeting ground to people who use food as a medium and who present their audience with a multi-sensory experience in the dining room, or gallery space. Our objective is to open avenues of collaboration between these artists and culinary professionals.”

Very cool. But also quite strange. Miwa was performing a “gastronomic interactive installation” alongside a wacky, carnivalesque troupe of ladies who were yelling and screaming while doing weird things with vegetables, I’m not sure what, exactly. (We think maybe they were commenting on early-20th-century Lower East Side culture but we could be totally wrong.)

Miwa, wearing an “Ice Love New York” (get it?) T-shirt of her own design, was serving homemade ice-cream based on immigrant foods. Last night it was borscht. Tonight it was smoked salmon and bagel, which she dished out in separate scoops. Rather than blend the two together, you were supposed to take a taste of one and then a little nibble of the other. I cannot describe what it is like to bite into a spoonful of creamy white ice cream, your brain expecting vanilla and tasting…the EXACT likeness of bagel. She made it by dissolving a bagel in milk, then whipping it up in her ice cream maker. Brilliant. Mad. Yummy. Totally screwed with my head.

Miwa has been incorporating food and eating rituals into her work since her art school days in Paris. She’s done a faux-spa with edible treatments and pieces based on pommegranite seed vapors and handmade soy milk–it’s all sort of Grant Achatz meets Rikrit Tiravanija. In France, she found gallery-goers more gung-ho to sample unusual creations; Americans, meanwhile, have proved a bit more timid–interested in looking but not always tasting, which means missing out on the full meaning of her art. Thus she cooked up the idea to use always-popular ice cream as her medium; who could turn down free ice cream? It’s high-concept art that goes down easy.

To read more about her work, check out her website. Or see below for teasers of some of her other noteworthy projects: lighting sculptures at BDDW plus eco-friendly sea creatures made from repurposed plastic bottles.

–Jen Renzi

Miwa and fan at a similar performance at Flux factory in December:

Her PET bottles, plus a poetic description from her website: “On trash: Since I moved to NY four years ago, I have started to see garbage as small creatures. Everywhere I go they are waiting for me. I pass by and they want to talk with me.”