Shana Nys DambrotCosimo Cavallaro has been working with food for much of his career — both as rendered imagery and, more controversially, as actual perishables. Over the years and on both coasts, this has manifested as an immersive installation of abstract expressionism in ketchup, a melting chocolate Jesus that set the New York art world aflame once upon a different time, and a series of monumental jelly beans appearing in L.A.’s manicured public spaces.
Cosimo Cavallaro: The Cheese Wall (video still); Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Cosimo Cavallaro, merch from The Cheese Wall project; Credit: Courtesy of the artist
The Cheese Wall is his latest art project, and it's certainly among his most political and potentially his most ambitious. “We have an expiration date here in our planet,” Cavallaro states, “and the only way we can last is through a documentation of our being.”
A direct, if cheeky and eventually stinky, response to the egregious and absurd situation with the U.S./Mexico border wall, Cavallaro’s action exists in the Dadaist tradition of humor in dark times, the Fluxus tradition of performative ephemeral object-making, and the YouTube world of global viral video art.
Follow the project at cheesewall.com and on Instagram at @artaboveground.
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