COOKING WITH JOHN

 

22.05.2021 - 26.06.2021 

Haydens (exhibition website)

Melbourne AU

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A John Nixon lunch is soup, reheated on the stove top, with different recipes week to week. It is “only two olives left, one for me, one for you”. It is red capsicums in a pink bowl and green cucumber on a blue plate; an assemblage of colour and form like a constructed painting, which sometimes shares the lunch table. On other occasions, a pie or a sausage offer a departure from the usual routine. Occasionally there is cake, always there is bread.

 

Enacted almost as ritual, the weekly lunch provided a pause in the day’s work. With John, the table was a site for eating, working, and talking, just as the food served upon it offered more than a form of sustenance or perhaps a new material for his practice; at John’s table, food became an analogical tool for discussion on art and life. “Show ten loaves of bread, okay, we understand what you do.”
 

Cooking with John takes its cue from a selection of John’s food analogies, recorded by his most recent assistants, Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović. The exhibition is a testimonial to John’s teachings through the presentation of new works by the artist friends and mentees from Nixon’s wide circle who have also had the pleasure of sharing John’s table. We present Cooking with John as an “anti-cookbook” wherein the analogies are the recipes and the artworks are the ingredients. 

The head chef has left but the kitchen remains open.

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Artists: Justin Andrews, Stephen Bram, Alinta Brown, Isabella Darcy, Laura Delaney, Stefano Condello, Gerard Kodde, Amalia Lindo, Rose Nolan, Davis Palliser, Rachel Schenberg, Jacqueline Stojanović, Hayden Stuart and Rudi Williams. 

 

Curators: Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović

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