1/4 — CABBAGES
An excerpt from Olivia Canny’s review “Food, Mundanity, Devotion: Flavor Profile at Border Patrol”
Just beyond the threshold of Border Patrol’s middle room is B. Quinn’s nine-page text-based work, 116 Actions in 24 Hours with a Purple Cabbage in Johnson, Vermont (2018). From the first few items, there is a comical and unsettlingly familiar quality to Quinn’s anthropomorphization of the cabbage: “5. I set you on top of the paper towel dispenser to take your photo, but now somehow my phone memory is full.” The dynamics of the narrator’s relationship with the cabbage offer introspection into how value and turbulence function within interpersonal relationships. Quinn shifts reference of the cabbage from “you” to “the cabbage” frequently, places it in the street to watch it get run over several times, buys a new cabbage as a replacement, totes that cabbage all around town, throws it at a garden gnome, and later patches it up with a bandaid. “91. Get up and walk, set cabbage down on top of fire hydrant that is close to three feet tall. You almost fall, but I catch you.” The organization and attention to detail mirrors a grocery list or a recipe for deconstructing one’s relationship to an other, be it tangible and edible, or projected and aggrandized. Across the hall from the text display, Quinn presents a precursor to the list, Purple Cabbage (2017), a series of graphite rubbings of a cabbage that mirror the variability in the artist’s sentiments as communicated in her writing.
Drawing series, 2017-ongoing.
An excerpt from Olivia Canny’s review “Food, Mundanity, Devotion: Flavor Profile at Border Patrol”
Just beyond the threshold of Border Patrol’s middle room is B. Quinn’s nine-page text-based work, 116 Actions in 24 Hours with a Purple Cabbage in Johnson, Vermont (2018). From the first few items, there is a comical and unsettlingly familiar quality to Quinn’s anthropomorphization of the cabbage: “5. I set you on top of the paper towel dispenser to take your photo, but now somehow my phone memory is full.” The dynamics of the narrator’s relationship with the cabbage offer introspection into how value and turbulence function within interpersonal relationships. Quinn shifts reference of the cabbage from “you” to “the cabbage” frequently, places it in the street to watch it get run over several times, buys a new cabbage as a replacement, totes that cabbage all around town, throws it at a garden gnome, and later patches it up with a bandaid. “91. Get up and walk, set cabbage down on top of fire hydrant that is close to three feet tall. You almost fall, but I catch you.” The organization and attention to detail mirrors a grocery list or a recipe for deconstructing one’s relationship to an other, be it tangible and edible, or projected and aggrandized. Across the hall from the text display, Quinn presents a precursor to the list, Purple Cabbage (2017), a series of graphite rubbings of a cabbage that mirror the variability in the artist’s sentiments as communicated in her writing.
Drawing series, 2017-ongoing.
