Take Me to Your Apple Breeder
Jessica Rath Deacon Jones
A Deacon Jones is a large, oblong apple with juicy, coarse-textured flesh. A Kazakhstan Elite refers not to the ruling class of Borat's home-country, but one of the original, edible apple varieties hailing from its wilds. They're all part of Jessica Rath's Take Me to the Apple Breeder project, but if you try to take a big crunchy bite out of one, you're liable to lose your teeth faster than Matthew Barney in Cremaster 3.
You see, Rath sculpted these fruits out of porcelain and coated them with high fire glazes. Inspired by Michael Pollan's descriptions of rare apples in his book Botany of Desire, Rath spent part of 2009 scoping apples from the extensive collection of trees at the Plant Genetics Resource Unit in Geneva, New York, and plotting out her renderings.
Take Me to the Apple Breeder will be an upcoming exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The next installment, Apple Shadow, will focus on tree architecture and involve capturing silhouettes of leafless branches. Limited editions of Deacon Jones and Kazakhstan Elite are now available--if you're keen on shining up a porcelain apple of your very own--without being tackled by a security guard.
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