The sun rains agony on your unprotected body with malicious intent. Irritated skin starts to blister. Salt from beaded sweat slowly leaks in causing a thick, debilitating burn. Your salvation lies through the doors of the city of red and gold - McDonalds.
The thought of an ice-cold McDonalds coke, complete with bubbly droplets of condensed moisture ever so subtly dripping down the sides of your crisp, clean glass and a thick, juicy Big-Mac send your taste buds into uncontrollable convulsions and appropriately causes your pants to grow just a bit tighter (and that top button to miraculously come undone).
Erotic food novel this is not. Let us welcome you into the world of Trans-Evolutionary Bio-art.
Gracing the walls, halls, and rooms on the second floor of downtown Buffalo's CEPA art gallery is Corpor Esurit, the latest project from Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Demary.
Demary's living art piece follows an ant colony from a giant ant tank, complete with a recreation of the Buffalo sky-line, through a long tunnel that eventually funnels out onto a large Americana-inspired dinner table with a hearty collection of McDonalds food enclosed atop it.
Included within the "all you can eat" ant buffet are: french fries, cinnamon melts, baked apple pies, chocolate chip cookies, ranch and spicy Buffalo dipping sauces, apple dippers, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, strawberry, chocolate and vanilla milkshakes and cups of Sprite, Hi-C and that classic McDonald's Coke.
Across from the last McSupper is a bold red, white and blue list of all the foods within the exhibit and their ingredients. Printed on a glossy white display attached to the wall like a family portrait, one can't help but read what exactly they're eating, startled they're shoving down their throat on a consistent basis.
As much a statement as it is an exhibit, Corpor Esurit is an art expose on the state of the American diet. Think Super Size Me, but with ants.
By locking the busy-bodied insects within a McOnly-nourished home, Demary and the public can watch what the American fast food diet does to organisms other than humans.
After only a week of life piles of dead ants surround the outskirts of the McDonald's; the early results are frightening.
The general public can fill out forms on the exhibit and submit them. Included on the form is a space where you can draw what you see. A hit with the younger crowd, many of the children's drawings grace a bulletin board directly next to the display.
And yet, not all will appreciate Demary's living, experimental art, perhaps due to its sparse surroundings.
"I found it disappointing to go all the way downtown to find a single exhibit in a hole in the wall gallery," said sophomore film studies major Geoff Cook. "Granted, the exhibit was very interesting, but left me dissatisfied to find out that it was the only exhibit there. Also, it was very hard to find."
For the price of a train ticket, students can go watch an ever-changing piece of experimental art. Whether or not you like McDonald's (or ants for that matter), Demary's exhibit is deeply intriguing.
The exhibit is open now until December 20. Go do your best Mary Kate and Ashley impersonation and solve the case of the dollar menu and the decaying ants. Or watch it wreak havoc on a colony of ants and imagine that Woody Allen and Jennifer Lopez voice two of them.
Additional reporting by Jameson Butler, Staff Writer
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
