Reprinted from Vancouver Sun, February 11/08

VANCOUVER – “In lieu of an artist’s statement, cake will be served.” Somewhat perversely, this sentence is, in fact, Leah Rosenberg’s saucy artist’s statement for her work in the group show Let Them Eat Cake, on now at Gallery Atsui in Vancouver’s downtown east side. And she’s perfectly serious.

Rosenberg happens to work at San Francisco’s famous Tartine Bakery, and for the opening, she has prepared a fabulous, multi-layered pink cake with cream cheese icing that tastes as good as it looks.

“A cake to me is a work of art with the intention of generosity,” says Rosenberg, “it is an evocative work of colour and balance.”

Rosenberg’s non-edible works, most of which she makes by using layer-upon-colourful-layer of acrylic paint, recall the hard-edge style of the late 1950s and are reminiscent of decadent French pastries. This is particularly true of her three-dimensional layered piece entitled Cake on Wall, and her flan-like, triangular, Piece of Cake #1.

If Rosenberg’s work suggests the physical form of cake, Vancouver photographer Jennifer Mawby’s sensual and mysterious photographs represent the spirit of cake, which is of course the spirit of consumption.

Asked how she approached this show, Mawby says, “Cake is something people love to consume. If people engaged in art with the same freedom, it would be way more enjoyable.”

Mawby takes a deliberately frivolous, “post entitlement feminist” look at feminine archetypes in her work for this show. Her large images, derived from pictures she took with her cell phone, depict beauty without feeling the need to comment on it. She even went so far as to hang a massive image of two French poodles in an ornate gilt frame, for no other reason than she felt like it.

Viewing her piece Manicure is like looking at an image from a vintage fashion magazine through an old pair of opera glasses. The result is an obscured beauty, blurred and pixelated, somewhat suggestive of work by painter Gerhard Richter, and quite different from the carefully staged hyper-reality of Vancouver School photographers like Jeff Wall.

And if there is a direct connection to the old-world phrase, “Let them eat cake” in this show, it has to be painter and tapestry artist Ruth Jones, who learned her historic European tapestry technique in Aubusson, France, and whose exquisitely crafted and slightly disturbing woven tapestry Ta Patisserie hangs near the front of the gallery.

It features a woman holding out a melting pastry. The woman, with her hair piled on top of her head like some kind of elaborate St. Honoré cake, somehow channels Marie Antoinette, whose glib remark in the face of starving French peasants is the basis for the title of this show.

The Atsui’s guest-curator Sherri Kajiwara, formerly of the Buschlen Mowatt, Pthalo, and Bjornson Kajiwara Galleries, and now working with Vantage Art Projects, has had Marie Antoinette on the brain for some time.

“Ever since I saw the Sophia Coppola movie about her,” she confesses.

The irony of mounting a show called Let them Eat Cake in a gallery on the downtown east-side isn’t lost on Kajiwara.

“The show works on a number of levels,” she says. Social commentary aside, Kajiwara wanted to explore the fun side of art in a conscious way. It’s an active curatorial vision, one that includes hosting tea parties at the gallery every Saturday, and involving food artist Joanne Strongman, whose faux-food sculpture There is no Cake” greets visitors at the entrance.

On the whole, if there is a criticism of this show it’s that the curatorial mission may somewhat overshadow the collection of pieces assembled. Then again, for a group show in a small space, one does get a sense of all the artists involved, and it is quite interesting to consider their diverse and highly individual work in connection to a unifying theme.

If different means there will be more dessert at art openings – then let them indeed eat cake.

Inspired by a pivotal scene in the 2006 Academy Award winning film Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola and contemplating the traditional historical creative outlets for women of so-called domestic arts, Let Them Eat Cake features the work of three artists, in diverse mediums, who turn the entire concept on its ear. The modern world is driven by desire for sex, money and food, not necessarily in that order. Cake is a delicious metaphor for life.

Leah Rosenberg is a Canadian living the US. She completed her masters at the California College of Art in San Francisco in 2008. Ruth Jones is a Vancouver based tapestry artist trained in Paris and New York, whose work hangs in the Koerner Wing of the MOA. Jennifer Mawby is a multi-media artist based in Vancouver.

“A cake to me is a work of art with the intention of generosity. It is beautiful, it is structural, it is an evocative work of color and balance. And then people eat it. They consume it. They find it too sweet or too sticky or too vanilla-y. And then they move on. This is the generosity of art. Create with intention and then, set it free.” Leah Rosenberg

commemorate an event, arrival or passage. I played with spelling the two names out as one word, and liked it very much, because, in the saying of it, the meaning becomes “Your Pastry” which suits the gesture of offering that I intend.” Ruth Jones

With a combination of these three mediums, we propose to transform Gallery Atsui’s front exhibition space into a contemporary re-enactment of that pivotal Marie Antoinette scene where we can Let Them Eat Cake!