Christin Boggs - LENSCRATCH

Christin Boggs by Aline SmithsonDecember 14, 2010

Photographer Christin Boggs is looking at what is on our plate at a time when our supermarkets are bursting with selection. This embarrassment of edible riches seems further and further away from their humble beginnings and that’s not a good thing. Christin’s recent project, Slow & Steady, promotes sustainable food practices through photography and community development. She holds a MFA in Imaging Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in Art and Visual Technology from George Mason University.

Her work is reasonating with viewers, and she has work in three shows that opened on the same evening in New York, Virginia, and Washington DC. Christin recently closed her thesis exhibition, at the Design Gallery at the Rochester Regional Community Design Center. The exhibition opened with a reception that incorporated food, art and community participation. Sustainable food producers contributed bread, biscotti, fair trade organic coffee, and vegetables from small, organic farms.

I am also featuring a few images from her still Life project, Cheap Fix plus a terrific video on The Consumption of a Still Life.

Slow & Steady explores the contemporary movement away from mass-produced food and towards creative alternatives that offer vitality and potency to participants and their surroundings. In the Greater Rochester Region, individuals have rejected convenience food to responsibly grow, prepare and share sustenance in cooperative groups.

Dora the Explorer, Rochester Roots, 2009

The photographs depict scenes from community gardens, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, and farmers markets. Here exists a community of resourceful people, coming together in pursuit of good food. Slow & Steady points to one of the ways in which art can effect social change through the representation of healthy and sustainable food practices.

Free Range Chickens, Nordic Farms Jams and Jellies, 2010