jenna spevack

On Site | 8 Extraordinary Greens

Jenna has designed an efficient, sub-irrigated system for growing energy-packed plants (microgreens) in small, urban spaces. Her aim: to provide healthy greens to extraordinary people with ordinary incomes.

As an urban agricultural design project, she envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens, but as an art project, she hopes to facilitate conversations about different values: convenience vs creative effort, regenerables vs disposables, neighbors vs strangers.

EXHIBITION at MIXED GREENS:

Mixed Greens
531 West 26th Street, 1st Floor
New York, NY 10001

May 3–June 2, 2012
(( Press Release ))

This participatory exhibition, which includes a series of "domestic microfarms" and a "farmstand", explores, through interactions with gallery visitors, the value placed on food, community, and creative effort.

Jenna started experimenting with apartment-sized farming by converting her bookshelf into a mini greenhouse. To suggest a feeling of domesticity, household objects have been modified to house the microfarms. For example: a dresser, a suitcase, a chair, a kitchen cabinet, a desk, etc. are adapted with a planter and lights.

The installation is also staged with references to Aesop’s fable “The Cock and the Jewel,” a riddle about relative value. In the story, a cockerel searching for food finds a precious gem, but rejects it, wishing for corn instead.

A small "farmstand" serves as a space for the harvest and sale of eight kinds of microgreens. The gallery visitors determine the monetary value of the exchange, based on a set of choices that will support local, urban agriculture non-profits, like Added Value, Just Food, Bushwick City Farms, and Bed Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. They may then choose to take the greens or leave them to be donated to CHIPs Soup Kitchen.

These transactions are recorded in the form of a "receipt"- a print signed by both the consumer and artist. The consumer takes the receipt and a duplicate is hung in the gallery to record the collective value of the exchanges over the course of the exhibition.

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Most of the materials and services to realize this exhibition have been donated, bartered, or salvaged. Special thanks to the following companies and individuals who have donated materials and services for the project: