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Otherworldly Landscapes Made from Junk Food

By Ellyn Kail on December 16, 2014

Fruit Loops Landscape

Moonrise on Bologna

Blue Dye #1 Precipice

For Processed Views, photography duo Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman construct sweeping landscapes from highly refined foodstuffs, including sugary breakfast cereals and sodas, canned and packaged meats, snack chips, and candy.

For the artists, food carries with it not only a nutritional value but also cultural significance, tied with notions of parenting, care-taking, and nourishment. When our meals are heavily processed, stripped, and added to, we face not only hazards to our health and well-being but also the exploitation of the earth and our natural resources.

Built in studio using only items found at popular groceries, Processed Views offers surreal visions of a future in which bright colors belie harmful chemicals and where healthfulness gives way sugary sweetness. The worlds imagined by Ciurej and Lochman are each modeled after a different photograph by Carleton Watkins, whose iconic visions of the American West inspired the construction of the country’s original national parks while also providing advertising imagery for the often environmentally destructive mining and railroad industries.

Like the transcendent and sublime topographies envisioned by Watkins, Ciurej and Lochman’s candy-coated American landscapes speak to the capitalist fantasies that we so often project onto the untapped corners of the earth. The manifestation of these aspirations, while certainly seductive, ultimately emerge as an empty promise, with each indulgent layer proving to be far more threatening than it is enticing.

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