Bowie + Eve

Collaboration with Bowie Zunino as Bowie + Eve. How the Wassaic Project seed was born. Kicking around ideas in the middle of the night while making weird candy and listening to pop music on repeat. More on that here. We met in college. Her senior year she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which would come back in the ensuing years. My mom had died of cancer and, while I wasn’t sick myself, we had a bond through that. Fuck Cancer. We fell out of touch after school — but were thrown back together at the funeral of one of our college friends in 2007. We started collaborating while Bowie was at RISD and I was living in LIC with Josh, just starting to make public murals. It was easy. Sometimes the best things are easy.

Tattoo Drawing

Objects of Dysconsumption

Our first project together. All consumed in one night in 2008. Candy thermometers, teeth, knives, and bones. We threw this party at Monkey Town and the four walls of the room has a four channel video of our drawings. It was very strange and really wonderful.

Objects of Dysconsumption Postcard, 2008

A glass bowl filled with candy made to look like human bones.

Objects of Dysconsumption Bones, 2008, candy

A glass dish full of traditional, glass-style thermometers made of candy.

Objects of Dysconsumption Thermometers, 2008, candy

A glass dish full of candy made to look like human teeth.

Objects of Dysconsumption Teeth, 2008, candy

A glass dish full of butter knives made out of candy.

Objects of Dysconsumption Knives, 2008, candy

Candy Stripers

Another candy show. This time with blood vials. Extra creepy. Bowie had been getting a lot of blood work at this time related to her thyroid cancer and had been making sculptures with them as found objects. We made them into candy so you could actually consume this fear. My dad’s Mom was a candy striper in WWII outside Philly. She described just hanging out with these young soldiers who had gotten badly hurt — and often disfigured — and just spending time. This was powerful imagery in terms of comfort, women’s roles, and the medical industry. Comfort is critical — and doing something for someone else has shown to have a powerful healing effect on sick patients. An idea we have (that we haven’t made yet) is to have free postcards available to patients — say in dialysis or chemo infusion centers — for notes of gratitude or hellos to other people as an activity during (and distraction from or supplement to) treatment.

Candy Stripers Dress, 2008

Screenshot of a text insert for an art show that reads: Objects of Dysconsumption: Candy Stripers. Edible Sugar Candies by Bowie + Eve. EveBiddle dot com. BowieZunino dot com. Candy Stripers continues the Objects of Dysconumption series engaging participants to examine what we choose or refuse to consume. Candy ingredients: sugar, corn sytup, water, corn syrup, food coloring. Silicone was used in the production of this candy.

Candy Stripers Insert, 2008

Iron Pour

We were both living in Providence for a few months in the fall of 2008 after the first Wassaic Project Festival and we taught a class at the Steel Yard in candy casting. While we were there, there was an iron pour and we made a giant candy mold to pour iron into. The photos are better than anything we produced, but it was great fun — and probably why, in 2018, I was so into doing iron pours at Kearny Point!

Two people in protective suiting lift and pour iron.

Iron Pour Providence, 2008

Two people in protective suiting lift and pour iron from.

Iron Pour Providence, 2008

An iron pour in action, with flames rising from a container.

Iron Pour Providence, 2008

Temporary Vitals

Bowie has no thyroid and yet it is apparently a vital organ — it was removed because of her thyroid cancer. This isn’t wildly unusual — and thyroid cancer is on the rise in developed countries — though it felt totally out of place when we were 22. Ultimately this project was about raising awareness around thyroid cancer, but in a playful way. We did events where you could put a thyroid tattoo onto your thyroid, turning your organ inside out. As the project progressed we took more formal portraits of women who don’t have thyroids wearing the tattoos.

Photograph of a person's throat with a temporary tattoo of a thyroid over the location of the thyroid.

Temporary Vitals

Wristbands

How we label ourselves in our times of greatest vulnerability has almost no humanity. We wanted to experiment with giving that moment some dignity and hope. The text was generated by asking people to describe others who were in the hospital. Some of it was beautiful and uplifting, some of it was just depressing.

Several hospital-style ID bracelets laid on a surface with descriptive captions where the name and patient information might be, such as

Wristbands

Wristbands Digital Quilt

Wristbands Embroidery Square

Model for Collective Memory

We don’t have great photos of this project… c’est la vie. It was about 150 ceramic seed pods that were glazed with drawings from my mom’s brain scans. They were displayed on tables that Bowie and I built with wood salvaged from Wassaic and displayed at the Re-Institute along with a 15 foot tall mural of a rib cage.