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Located at 200 Bay Street, Royal Bank Plaza, Concourse level, North of Indigo Spirit Book Store

No.9: Con­temporary Art & the Envi­ron­ment is proud to present a commis­sioned large scale public photo­graphic work by the cel­ebrated Artist Dean Baldwin.

In 1960, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri affixed to a table the accumulated residue of a meal, and then mounted it on the wall as the first of many ‘snare paint­ings’. A decade later San Francisco artist Tom Mar­ioni exhib­ited empty bot­tles with the ti­tle The Act of Drink­ing Beer with Friends is the High­est Form of Art. The work of Toronto based artist Dean Baldwin con­tinues this tra­dition of food&drink-as-life-as-art, with the cre­ation of fantas­tical function­ing sa­loons and elab­orate photoinstallations that doc­u­ment all the meals he has consumed in a year, or all of the food that he has discarded.

Fat­tening Frogs for Snakes presents it­self as a classic “old Dutch mas­ter” still-life, illus­trating the af­termath of deca­dence. The vi­sions of excess seem cel­ebratory at first, but this is a caution­ary tale – with the devil in the details. The party is over, the rev­ellers are gone and what remains is be­ginning to rot.

120" X 216"
Dig­ital Colour Photo­graph duraprene wallcovering
Curated by Andrew Davies