Sean Nash – Land Taste

LAND TASTE

November 11, 2022 – January 8, 2023

Sean Nash is a visual artist who works primarily through fermentation, gardening, and cooking. His paintings and sculptures draw on transformational relationships with plants and engage queer and trans ecological themes. Sean’s exhibitions often include fermented foods or their by-products, using food and fermentation to convene with communities and shine light on our microbial partners.

Sean received a 2017 Rocket Grant Award from the Charlotte Street Foundation for “Garden Variety Soda Fountain,” a sculptural soda cart project that served his fermented sodas in the garden where the ingredients were grown.

Documentation of Nash’s process, visits to farms, and more information about Kansas City’s diverse foodways will be on his website, senash.com

What we think of as taste, primarily results from what we can smell. This exhibitions’ title, Land Taste, rhymes with the words “hand taste,” the English translation of son-mat in Korean. Son-mat is a deeply meaningful term that encapsulates the contributions of the specific cook or fermenter’s hand with regard to taste. The hand is not only the love a person or family member puts into their cooking — in essence, their love is a unique microbial signature relayed to the food and
vice versa. The hand represents our microbiome and the microbes integral to food fermentation and the creation of complex flavors. Land Taste also evokes the French term terroir, meaning soil, or land and the connection between place and taste. In this exhibition, the artist’s hand is not just his. Land Taste conjures a lively ecosystem of fuzzy boundaries and sensorial play. Material relationships between kombucha paper, cabbage prints, improvisational collage, and colorful plant casts reflect the vibrant temporalities of our sensorial world.

The artwork created for Land Taste at Crossroads Hotel expands
on themes Nash created in his work for the new KCI airport. Titled Kansas City Reciprocity, his sculptural painting for the airport depicts six local farmers through their favorite things to grow. Over the 2022 growing season Nash documented the farmers and their passion for growing food. Kansas City Reciprocity presents sculptural casts of fruits and vegetables repeated across a sixteen foot span with a background painted in blue, yellow, and green washes. Many of the fabric cut-outs from Kansas City Reciprocity have been remixed in the wall collage for Land Taste.