Salt Fat Sugar & Your Water Is Safe considers food, animals, and the farm in relation to the commons, trade, and spiritual traditions. In this work, basic elements such as water, salt, fat, and sugar are invoked as poetic devices. Bringing together these seemingly disparate elements provokes contemplation and sheds light on a set of historical, social, and economic relations within advanced industrialism that often go unnoticed.
Salt Fat Sugar & Your Water Is Safe points to historical trade in commodities such as grease, pemmican, salt, sugar beets and honey along this part of the Red River. It suggests by turns the history of people, animals, work, and buying and selling. Its symbolism revolves around food production, the shrinking commons, the artistic avant-garde, and concrete poetry.
Through this work, the artist suggests a set of schisms in our world between our nature and industry, the commons and the private.
This work is was created through the Winnipeg Arts Council’s Public Art Program in collaboration with Winnipeg Transit, PCL, and Plenary Group as part of Winnipeg's SouthWest Rapid Transitway expansion project.
