Seafood Restaurant

Seafood Restaurant, 2009
aerated concrete blocks, mortar, digital C-print on aluminum, PVC, metal, dispersion paint
252 × 456 × 236 cm

Seafood Restaurant takes the L-shaped wall as the architectural cipher of a restaurant. Attached to its outer face is an aluminum panel that reduces a seafood menu to a grid of specially prepared and photographed dishes. Their presentation is deliberately cheap: portions appear parsimoniously measured, down to the counted onion rings, while the colors are simultaneously faded by an imagined salt-laden sea air and pushed into artificial oversaturation. The panel is an advertisement and a Pavlovian lure, converting the fruits of the sea into image, appetite and exchange value.

Behind the restaurant, dismantled sections of a Carrera slot-car track lie in a recessed niche. Their thin, looping forms evoke a childhood memory, but also resemble seaweed washed ashore or kitchen refuse discarded behind the building.

The installation forms an architectural cipher and fantasy at the point where several circuits intersect: childhood and decomposition, seduction and forgetting, sea and land, consumption and waste. What the front offers as image and appetite returns at the back as residue: part seaweed, part kitchen waste, part childhood memory.

studio work:

shown in:
“Swiss Art Awards 2009”, Messe Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2009)

bibliography:
Swiss Art Awards 2009, exhibition catalogue, Federal Office of Culture, Bern, 2009, ISBN 978-3-9523148-8-3, pp. 66–69

Swiss Art Award reception for Seafood Restaurant