Lisa Alonzo’s “Easily Digestible” series now on view at Loakal Gallery explores the reality of our food consumption. Alonzo asserts that in this age of rapidly changing technology, it seems to be more difficult to decipher what is real and what is not, or indeed how we even define these two terms. In “Easily Digestible,” Alonzo explores these ideals from the perspective of food products, as often the preservatives found in food and its genetic modification have the potential to be harmful. Alonzo’s cake sculptures, topped with symbolic images such as rattlesnakes, gas masks, and QR codes reveal the dangers and their plasticity, illustrating traditional visual cues eyes can no longer be trusted and it becomes imperative to question what is seen.

Created in a similar medium and approach as the artist’s previous series, each image’s thousands of saturated dots or starbursts are applied in a pointillistic style using acrylic gel and a pastry tip, purposefully mimicking pixels within the stock images that Alonzo uses as an image resource. Says Alonzo: “The use of stock imagery is important as I want to present the object or idea in its most universal symbolic form. I look for images that have a disturbing aspect to them, and then manipulate that image to create something beautiful and enticing, alluring and consumable, but shouldn’t be.” The use of internet stock image photos also raises artist’s concern of the visual allure of manipulated items, separated by many stages of enhancement from its original state.

Lisa Alonzo, “Easily Digestible” is at Loakal Gallery through the month of February