Yellow banana bunch 9″ x 8″ Banquet medallion sunburst banana boat EAPG 1960’s 13″ x 4″ Green bananas 12″ x 3.5″
Stoneware, glaze, underglaze, gold luster, glass
“Artist Erika NJ Allen’s work explores the political meanings behind fruits that seem delicious and innocuous. Here, she shows bananas extending from a glass pedestal. They are not lying on their side, silently cuddling one another. Rather, they shoot straight up, threatening to bite back and refusing to sit politely for consumers. Below them are green serpentine bananas that coil around the glass stand like snakes. Erika rejects the idea that fruit and its representation is something to merely satisfy one’s appetite or decorate one’s dining room. Wars have been fought over this fruit to satisfy imperial appetites. “ Shana Klein – The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion.
Item is located in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Local pickup available. Shipping unavailable. Delivery within 40 miles available for an additional $50 fee.
Erika NJ Allen is a Guatemalan born artist, and a first-generation college student. While pursuing her BFA she went through a hysterectomy that changed the trajectory of her life and practice. Using ceramics, fresh produce, and analog photography as vehicles, she seeks to engage life and death. As she continues to find ways in which clay and fruit can live together – just like a body lives with an implanted object – her journey to improve the human condition through art will go on. Each work of art visualizes Allen’s diet which plays a key role in her healing, both mentally and physically, while attempting to convey a feeling of resilience. The process of the ‘making’ has become therapeutic, allowing for vulnerabilities to become known and easy to share with the goal to encourage others to open to their own challenges and resilience.
It is through the process of curiosity and experimentation while healing, that she found her voice as an artist. And through that discovery she developed her own organic glaze from the produce she digests, which she uses in her ceramic work.
