Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery 2008
A Fieldfaring Project with Joe McHenry
The Show Needs You, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, California
Curated by Susan O’Malley
The work in this exhibition needs multiple audiences, including those who participate in the creation of the work and those who witness art in-the-making. This Show Needs You encourages discussion and exploration of what art means and what art is in the context of collective social experience. Susan O’Malley
Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, created with Joe McHenry, drew upon the participation of San Jose citizens to realize a bio-active installation that literally transformed itself while on view in the gallery. Inspired by the confluence of San Jose's early agricultural history and the enduring popularity and ever-present lemon tree as an emblematic California lawn "accessory", we collected over a half ton of yard-grown lemons from the area (mostly dropped off at the gallery), preserved them with salt and herbs. In this large-scale collective action, preserving fruit on a mass scale, we used the exhibition time in the gallery as a “productive” 6-week-period for the preserved fruits to cure, essentially superimposing the requirement for a gallery exhibition to be converted into “use-value. The gallery staff turned the jars upside down each day.
Rows of the yellow jarred fruit were displayed, alongside local stories and portraits of citizen's yards and trees, turning the gallery into a charged space of stored energy and culinary potential. Participants were back at the end of the exhibition to pick up a jar or two of preserves.
During the opening, then San Jose City Councilman Sam Liccardo, (currently Mayor) made a public proclamation naming May 2, 2008, LEMON DAY!
