Unplated: An Interview with Justin Tyler Tate
Exploring answers to modern problems, from sustainability to architecture, through interactive art
This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
A brief aside before we dive in: I’m so excited to announce my new pickling spice blend with my friends at Burlap and Barrel!
I hand-selected and fermented the peppers, and created a blend using their single-origin spices that can be used for pickles but is versatile enough to be used for just about any savory dish and even for a spicy mulled wine (really!)
It just launched yesterday, so if you’re looking for a way to spice up your summer preserves and meals, I hope you’ll give it a try!
I first learned about Justin Tyler Tate’s work through his more food-focused pieces, but quickly learned that his work expands well beyond any particular subject. Justin Tyler Tate was born in Canada, grew up in the United States, and now works internationally. He earned his BFA from NSCAD University, and his MFA from Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts.
Tate’s work combines installation, media, performance, and social art. Tate interweaves knowledge from various fields, in order to find solutions to contemporary problems: architecture, carpentry, botany, cooking, electronics, chemistry, new-media, and more, all merged under a single umbrella of artistic production.
I’m drawn to work that, like my own, sits at the intersection of many practices and many perspectives, and Tate’s interview has left me inspired and eager to jump over to my easel, my writing desk, and my kitchen in equal measure.
JS: First of all, tell me a bit about your background. What inspires your artistic practice?
JTT: I spent half of the first 24 years of my life in Canada, half in Florida, and since then have lived and worked mostly in Europe and Asia, with the occasional project in North America. Both my Bachelor's and Master's are in art, which informs how I conceptualize my work, but more often than not I use processes and materials which are not traditional or common within the canon of art production.
This is really a result of my practice being inspired and driven by my own curiosity, about subject areas such as botany, chemistry, engineering, electronics, architecture, design, maker culture, craft, distillation, and food. I see my own art production as a way to challenge myself, empower others, while also experimenting with solutions and raising concerns for environmental problems.
JS: What role does food play in your work, either as subject or inspiration?
JTT: Most of the time it plays a more peripheral role; such as when I have worked with the the artifacts of contemporary food production (ex: Archipelago, Cube Farm & The Cave) as materials, or creating structures which enable localized food production ( ex:Mushhouse & Scaffold), using food(drink) as an element for performance and critique ( ex: Lemonade Stand & Tiki-Hut), or using foraging and distillation as key aspects for creating site-specific primarily non-visual experiences ( ex: Primrose Promises), and then food as one of Maslow's hierarchy of needs also informed a section of my project/book/website (re)Construction Manual.
It's not that often that I actually get to engage with food as a primary subject/component in the work, but I do try to utilize it as much as I can because everyone has their own personal relationship to it that then gets imbued into their reading of the work.
Technically Lemonade Stand was the first project that really utilized food/drink as an integral part of the work, but I think only really started to become commonplace in my work when I started teaching workshops like Fast & Raw and Fake It Till You Make It which kind of opened my eyes to the potential for using food in my practice. Future Fantasmi came shortly afterwards, where I really got to engage with all aspects of food production, including the sharing of traditions, to its social and cultural importance.
Within the scope of Future Fantasmi, food was really the subject and inspiration for the work, and last year it was finally fully realized when I published it as a graphic cookbook. The kind of format that was developed through Future Fantasmi of incorporating food with research, installation and dialogical art really kind of evolved into components of Dialectics of Space, which inspired and informed Peer2Pickle.
JS: What, to you, is the intersection of our ecosystem and our foodways? How can understanding one help us better understand the other?
JTT: Our foodways are intricately linked to and informed by our ecosystems, in that the geography, geology, biology and climate of a place inform the people, including their culture, diet, history and social relationships. As culinary traditions develop through every generation, they become a living story of each family as well as of each society, which changes and is added to over time. This develops as a kind of food-based-DNA, which is molded by the ecosystem(s) in which it develops. In this our foodways are simultaniously personal, political as well as environmental: when we understand the route that a foodway has traversed, we cannot help but realize how a place's climate has helped to shape it.
JS: I'm fascinated by your work (like in Peer2Pickle) that uses art to tackle food waste. How are installations and events, as you've done, uniquely positioned to help inspire sustainability?
JTT: In my mind, there are two reasons why art-particularly that takes the form of installations and events- is uniquely positioned to help inspire sustainability. The first is because of because it is not limited to one avenue of research, set of tools or final format, but can utilize a divergent approach for the totality of its production.
By this I mean that a single project can use expertise from different fields of knowledge, synthesizing them into a body of work that is not limited to a certain medium; but can simultaneously take the form of exhibition, installation, website, digital media, design, workshops, et cetera.
The second is that installations and events are immersive in ways that other modes of art production are not, as they invite viewers into the body of art as active participants and contributors. The final format of the work thus determines whether the person is merely a viewer of it or an actor in it. As people have agency in the activation and development of the work, they're given a share of its authorship, and thereby more reason to be invested in the reason of the work's being.
JS: You encourage interaction, either through events like dinner parties, or through handling materials like (dis)assembling and reimagining air conditioning units by visitors.
How do you decide what experiential or co-creative elements to include? What do you hope people take away from encountering your art in this way?
JTT: I want all of my work to be as immersive, co-creative, and as playful as it can be so that viewers are empowered to become participants, as they become physical with the work, experience unique situations, or literally ingest the work, while also challenging their curiosity and ability for problem solving.
By making work that necessitates engagement, it's my hope that participants are encouraged to get deeper into it and that the work will stay with them longer. In some ways it can be an escape from the crushing weight of contemporary life under advanced capitalism, because my work is primarily non-commercial and often open-source, but it also provides a vision for an alternative future.
JS: What is the future of your artistic practice? Where do you want to go from here?
JTT: Well, I'm looking at PhD programs while developing my thesis for Post-Anthropocene Architecture in the meantime. I've got the problem of having more project ideas than I have places to produce them at, time or money to produce them with. I'm working on quite a few books at the moment: a couple illustrated books on wild edible plants, one about coconuts, maybe a cookbook(or two), and others.
My practice is--by design--constantly challenging for me and always building upon itself, as a kind of continuous body of research, so as I keep getting opportunities to do grander, more interesting and more complicated projects, I'm going to keep doing that.
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This was so inspiring! Thank you for sharing.