You Aren't As Green As You Are Cabbage Looking

This evening, Transformer Gallery will be hosting a series of performances collected by artist Fereshteh Toosi to kick off her new exhibit, You're not as green as you are cabbage looking. This show closes out the month-long Exercises for Emerging Artists, curated by Victoria Reis and Niels Van Tomme.

Toosi’s work of late is part performance, part interview, and part soda jerk. She asks people questions related to a topical issue or current event. “They are issues on the nightly news that may be on people’s minds, but they might not know exactly what is going on or how it affects them,” Toosi stated. In the course of the interview she provides the participant a beverage or a snack that is a play on the words of the topic. “I’m not a person that typically makes puns, but it carries me into places. I feel like food is a social lubricant, and that is what I use it for.”

Similar to how H&R Block helps people calculate their taxes, Toosi acts as a carbon emissions accountant for the fictional company H&R Cabbage, helping people calculate their carbon footprints. She will ask the participant questions relating to consumption, specifically: what do you recycle; how expensive is your energy bill; how many kilowatt hours do you consume; do you drive or fly regularly? The answers to these questions will be lumped into a spreadsheet and crunched to determine the size of anyone’s carbon footprint. While interviewing people about their carbon consumption, Toosi will make the participant a carbonated beverage.