Disgustingly delicious? How delightful, Townsville!
Human detritus and Vegemite are just two of the subjects in an exhibition that aims to delight and disgust at the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in Townsville.
Can an exhibition be delicious and disgusting? Well, yes, and the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in Townsville is showing us how that can true, right now, in a show called Yucky Yum Yum.
For this exhibition, curator Holly Arden has chosen works that explore our response to stressful times, such as the habitual reaching for a secretive “something” to release our tension … like the way people watch pimple-popping videos. (Apparently they are a “thing” – the internet is so helpful with sharing private obsessions.)
Most of us will understand what Arden, director of Townsville City Galleries, means about the experience at the heart of such antisocial (and usually solitary) pursuits. Visually yucky sensations can compel us to repeat them, yummy ones may stir the body and soul alongside the palate.
It’s hard to explain impetus, different for all of us, that the work in Yucky Yum Yum speaks to. What do you find disgusting, delicious or confronting?
There is science at the heart of this experience, with the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response identifying the frisson that might accompany these vaguely euphoric private moments. The thread that runs through the exhibition – which is aimed largely at kids – circulates around food and its triggers, the unnatural, disgusting and taboo. Yet while they explore very human conundrums, the art is fun and irreverent. The ridiculous is central to the installations, sculpture, painting, video and commissions that make up this show.
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“This is a big part of where I’m trying to go with the show,” Arden says. “It is a bit nonsensical, but there are also very serious and complex concerns, for example, with gendered work and labour.”
Videos by social media star Smac McCreanor (her Hydraulic Press Girl series with more than 100 episodes) have had millions of views on YouTube alone and offer an innovative take on a popular trend.
The internet offers up videos of objects being squished (squished videos – also a thing). In McCreanor’s take, two images side by side see a tube of Vegemite being crushed by a hydraulic press on one side, while she performs the feelings and reality of the tube with her body (dressed to resemble the salty spread) on the other. Its power, according to Arden, is in giving “the Vegemite a voice”.
This series draws on her skills as an actor, dancer, comedian – but McCreanor suggests that “artist” best describes her practice. Her first art excursion was at the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial (2023-24), and Yucky Yum Yum profiles her work in her Queensland birthplace. Her skills have taken her from Brisbane to LA, where she now lives and works.
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Sensual but serious is integral to the installation commissioned for this exhibition from Melbourne (now international) collective Hotham Street Ladies. Their collaboration harks back decades to their experience of sharing a house in Hotham Street in their 20s. While much of their work speaks to feminist concerns, and the messiness of the female body, the concerns of Lunch of Suffering, 2024, are current, pointing out the disfunction in workplace cultures that promote staff wellbeing and community while continuing to overwork employees to a level that makes work breaks impossible.
In this mixed media installation, an office has been created with desks loaded with stacks of ring binders, half-finished lunches, used teabags, coffee stains, crumbs and other human detritus – much of it made from fondant. On the walls and coffee mugs are inspirational slogans – “cultivate kindness”, “just believe in your dreams”, “you are your work ethic” and “you got this”. Arden describes the installation as “pretty disgusting, but hilarious as well”.
Integral to this exhibition is its appeal to younger people. Fun installations such as Kenny Pittock’s Anything is Popsicle! (a hands-on activity space for kids) subverts the way that we consume – thinking through how and what we eat and what memories are embedded in food. His ceramics and drawings are playful, with ice-cream fantasies that he invites the audience to engage with: mashed potato and gravy ice-cream, anyone? They fuel our curiosity about flavours outside the norm.
Brisbane-based Elizabeth Willing has made art about the dynamics of food – eating, making, digesting and excreting – integral to her practice, with the way that food creates memories, both positive and negative, existing like bookmarks in our lives. Her commissioned work for Yucky Yum Yum is an immersive wallpaper about 4m high and 10m long.
It is a digital collage of cakes from one of the Australian Women’s Weekly cakes cookbooks, interspersed with hyper-colour toy faces of animals and people. Called Clammy, it may be less delicious-looking than potentially dangerous, evoking the sickly feeling of overconsumption of sugar. An accompanying video sees the artist’s face pushed up against the camera, with a tongue viscerally licking a sheet of hardened sugar until it cracks.
Townsville/Gurambilbarra-based Jan Hynes also creates a significant twist on our relationship with animals and food. Her sculptural shoes extend R.M. Williams boots into kangaroo feet, lamingtons and watermelon in a wholeheartedly unnatural fashion.
The exhibition is designed to be visually overwhelming, with its sensuous approach to materials coalescing in the experience, beautifully summed up by its title. Audiences may be amused, intrigued or repelled, but a gut reaction is guaranteed.
Yucky Yum Yum continues at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, until March 9.