Journal of a Sabbatical

March 28, 1999

bread: material and metaphor

Archive of NATO/Kosovo Press Releases

Watchemocket Cove
6 buffleheads
19 mute swans
5 Canada geese
13 mallards
2 domestic geese
6 ring-billed gulls
8 red-breasted mergansers
7 starlings

Give us this day our daily bread...we fight for bread and we fight for roses too...in the tight hot cell of their hearts they have eaten dusty bread...half a loaf is better than none... the miracle of the loaves and fishes... panis angelicus...cast your bread upon the waters...

Bread is so loaded with symbolism that an artist would have to be pretty confident to use it is as his medium - the medium = the message? But Apo Torosyan's Bread Series at the Happy White Gallery in Barrington takes bread where it's never been before. The texture. The color. The shapes. Besides bread - specially baked and dried and scorched with a blowtorch - Torosyan uses sand, marble dust, dirt, and sometimes photocopies of magazine photos.

My favorites were the more abstract ones, circles and squares partly scorched on backgrounds of sand and marble dust. The earthy colors and the dense grainy texture draw the eye and hold it in sort of a restful place. A couple of the works turn the symbolism of bread in our culture totally upside down, using it as a symbol of famine instead of plenty. A round of bread broken down the center frames a pale ragged-edged photocopy of Armenian orphans. Ghostly faces of Armenian grandmothers hover over a barrier of bread. Weird but it works.

OK, a couple of pieces did look like burnt toast mounted on a canvas, but most of them had a lot more depth than that. I couldn't take my eyes off one of the two pairs of what looked like they might be church doors - vertical columns of large bread squares gilded with silver leaf. The more I looked, the more I saw: patterns and textures began to look like petroglyphs and ghost images.

The gallery attendant kicked us out so she could close up the gallery at 4:00. We left reluctantly.

We ended the afternoon counting ducks and watching a woman feeding bread to the swans at the cove.