The Brink: Jason Hirata

Jason Hirata's sculptures and drawings are about food, about specials in particular. One of his "specials," handwritten on a piece of paper as on a restaurant board, is "Plumpy'Nut," and you wonder, what is that? It is a peanut-butterish food made for the victims of malnutrition, and a single French company has a patent that makes it the only company that can produce it, only to be imported from the developed world, never to be produced where it is consumed. Hirata won the 2015 Brink Award, and his funny, sad, wonky, scruffy Brink Award show takes as its inspiration an early-19th-century print by Francisco de Goya and a 1981 speech by General Electric CEO Jack Welch. There is a great dissonant distance between Hirata's conceptualist style and the smells, tastes, and corpulences that his works conjure. JG