Megan McCready |…and eat it too | ziplocs, icing sheets, food coloring [2007]

Megan McCready is making an invitation to bake. And to put her, at her first birthday, surrounded by well-loved family, on your cake (frosted in white, and ideally 9” x 9”, for best results). Using printable icing sheets and an edible ink printer, McCready delivers …and eat it, too, a personal photo of the artist’s own first-cake thrill to be eaten, in turn, by the viewer—a kind of meta-cake decoration. This portable food-based art is a play on the larger installation work McCready typically creates—rooms full of Jell-o squares, a peanut butter and cracker quilt, a message in pancakes—taking the familiarity of the materials for those pieces and their intangibility as actual food-items and turning it over to see the other side: a fully edible, but intimately personal photo, free for the taking.

Exhibition Text: Shana Agid

Megan McCready was born and raised in the great wide wonderful world of Winona, MN, a beautiful city located in the Mississippi river valley. She grew up in a very supportive, middle class mid-western household where she ate chicken-wild rice hotdish and built forts in her backyard. After receiving her BA in Studio Art from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN, she took off for the west coast to pursue her master’s degree at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. In May of 2005 she received her MFA and shortly thereafter a notice in the mail reminding her of the ‘tens of thousands’ she owed the Department of Education. Megan is currently a Minneapolis-based artist. Her work and research continues to focus on the social, political, and scientific issues related to food, combined with her own personal experiences and nostalgia.

Delos Reyes:Fulford:Gordon:Guttin:Hilton:Kleker:McCready:Neese:Purbrick:Randolph:Slack