Cornucopia
Bernie Miller
October 19, 1994 – April 15, 1995
Bernie Miller, Cornucopia, 1994; aluminum structure, 17'H x 18'L ; back-lit display box, 9'L x 6'6" H; barrels, 30'L x 12'W. Materials: aluminum, galvanized steel, Dura-trans film, florescent fixtures, polyethylene. Overall dimensions: 30'L x 25'W x 17' H
Artist Statement
The wall and the garden metaphorically form a conjunction of Utopia and Paradise. Yet this current place and time of an urban garden spans from summer fruition to the involutions of autumn. If this seasonal image intermingles with the image of Paradise/Utopia, speculations on optimism, consumerism, technology and media might be evoked.
The sculpture Cornucopia is comprised of three parts: (1) A decidedly fabricated component that suggests simultaneously the conical shape of a horn of plenty, a stylized early modernist construction and the supporting structure of a billboard. (2) A back-lit image in the place of the wide 'mouth' of this cornucopic form, with a plentitude of produce tumbling forth like its contents. This photograph of a sumptuous display mimics the gigantic, idealized imagery unofficially known as 'food pornography' that we most frequently encounter hovering over us as point-of-purchase grocery advertising. (3) Displayed adjacent to and in front of this image are industrially derived polyethylene objects, drums, stacking containers, and bins, and as we can see, available in a wide range of colours. This wide range of choice is something commonly trumpeted in the retailing of consumer goods, yet here there is an equation of industrial equipment with consumer goods. With this, the categories of 'production' or 'consumption' vacillate, revealing themselves to be hypothetical, perhaps only temporary rhetorical constructions. The confounding of these two terms is enhanced by the way in which the colours of these objects correspond approximately to the colours in the back-lit image of fruit. An ambivalence about North American plentitude - of plenteous production and relentless consumption - is reinforced by the ominous connotation of toxic contents.
The over-all sense of this work, for me, is that of a billboard, distorted in form and content, spewing its representations into an idealized space in the actual world.
Text by Jeanne Randolph
