Mary Parisi: Soup
Complicated Comfort
“Like many others today, I see food as a complicated comfort. This aspect of being attracted and repelled carries through in much of my work. I think it is part of looking at things as they are. Often my photographs delve into abstraction but the real, sometimes unsightly, aspects of life are still present; there is the bit of animal tissue floating in the soup.
“The people in Tolstoy’s novels have the possibility for both good and evil and this makes one believe in the truthfulness of the writing, to believe that something real from life has been crafted in to the novel. I hope that the same is true in my photographs, that I have allowed the subject to bring with it those aspects from life that might not seem to fit with the estheticized object, so that through discord an authentic view of life is captured.”
Parisi has a solo show of soup and other food at the Griffin Museum in Boston, through June 20th, 2010.
