Fruit and vegetables were the first foods that humans laid their hands upon and birthed into truths and myths revealing the frailties of the human condition. Superimposed and dispersed amongst these images of fruit is a modern idiom that seeks connection to its audience.
We are called to witness the ripeness of the tomatoes that are restrained by the sutures thus confronting us with the ephemeral and chaos that surrounds us. Their bruised imperfections are what come from a natural order where fruit is not shaped by man’s ideas of how the world is formed. Yes, we organic beings are vulnerable and will someday perish akin to the skulls and flesh imposed on the mounds of fruit in various states of decomposition. Mankind is king of all things and in the end, mankind must follow the natural order.
At first sight of the citrus, we wonder if this is an image of the natural form of decay; but, upon closer inspection, it is our world that sits on bedrock decaying. So far as we know, we are the only living beings in this solar system as the citrus is the only animate object that sits on rocks that will live through hundreds of regenerations of animate organic life. This theme is also suggested in the “Fallen” where skulls and the muscular structure are prominently dispersed on a fruit pile that will begin the process of decay. Human kind is born of seeds placed in the earth and the earth is where man lays as his final resting place to feed the earth and generate new life.
Finally, as we study the onion we note its many layers until we recognize ourselves in its layers via the flesh that merges with the onion. The redness of the meat along with the onions’ pigment are so well sculpted that one becomes the other. We are what we consume and we consume ourselves.
As our eyes flow from one image to the next, this montage combines creation beliefs that touch upon many cultures of how mankind came into being along with where we all will end.
In the images of fresh cut fruit along with decay are seeds which hearken back to the religious and reverent as a source of humanity’s biography. Seeds are the foundation from which sexuality and life springs and its sweetness is the lure.
Persephone’s sentence in Hades is numbered by the amount of pomegranate seeds she consumes.In Judaism, seeded fruits are associated with the suffering and rebirth of Christ. The diachronic nature of “Birth of Pomegranates” calls to mind distance and time from a ground level perspective that plays on vulnerability as the surplus fruit floats in a ditch of water. Additionally, ripened figs connect to Adam and Eves calling forth the sweetness of sensuality while modesty and temperance represented by the leaves are used to conceal their shame after the fall. As an audience, which of the temptations should we follow? Joice fades the leaves while the fruit dominates the frame in “Angry Fruit Up Close.”
Lethia Cobbs was born in South Central Los Angeles and attended CSU Long Beach for her bachelor and master's degree in Composition and Rhetoric. She is a writer, doll artist and amateur musician in between her full-time gig. Her blog on mental illness titled, I Hear Voices-Can You Hear Them Too? can be found at http://wordpress.com/stats/insights/touchstonecobbs.wordpress.com. She wishes she could live many different lives at once.