Micro-Questionnaire: Vanessa Dualib

This was on the Spike Jonze's mates / Where The Wild Things Are team blog, We Love You So. It's really very cool. Celebrating anthropomorphic vegetables in a way that doesn't involve just finding carrots and potatoes that resemble genitalia. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago we featured the inimitable Edith Zimmerman as an examplar of high-concept food trickery. Well, it turns out there’s more than one way to impart human characteristics onto vegetables!

Meet Vanessa Dualib, a 29 year-old Brazilian artist and photographer living and working in São Paulo. Her book, “Playing With Food”, documents the mind-expanding convergence of her three favorite things: food, photography, and humor. Get a comprehensive preview at Vanessa’s Flickr page, and read on for a micro-questionnaire.

Hey Vanessa! What do you like about working with food?

The possibilities! Truly. They are absolutely endless! I honestly tell people that there are some fruits and veggies in this world that are ‘born’ to be something else. It’s not really how I look at them, but more of how they look at me.

Do you work in other media too?

Currently I am focusing on photography– I still have a lot to learn. And most important of all, I’m still trying to convince my mom that what I do can be considered a form of art. The last time she saw me photographing one of my creations she looked at me with that familiar disapproving look and said “I sure hope you plan on eating that once you’re done playing with it…”

Yes, mom. I will.

Have you read “Where The Wild Things Are”?

I was pretty young when I first read Sendak’s book and it was totally different from anything else I had ever seen or read. The illustrations blew my mind and there was also this other ‘thing’ about this book, something that only later on my life I could define better. And that was actually that for me the essence of WTWTA lies in the genuine ability of the book to portray the feelings and fears of a child…

What are your favorite foods to work with?

Fruits and veggies. Any kind. I got a soft spot for eggs too. By now all my friends are very likely getting nervous when they invite me to lunch or dinner at a public place… probably thinking “Oh my… if she makes the olives talk to the waiter again I’m never going to invite her for lunch ever again!!”