White Zinfandel 2

A biannual publication by W/— Projects in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture, White Zinfandel is devoted to the visual manifestation of food and culture produced within the lives of creative individuals. The second issue of White Zinf, as its editors have come to call it, brings together a mostly-new cast of characters who have devoted their creative energies to indulge a sometimes perverse obsession with art and food. The first issue of White Zinf was inspired by the ethos of Gordon Matta Clark’s FOOD restaurant — raw, resourceful and a celebration of New York’s downtown artist community in the 1970s.

For the second issue, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Rather than the singular and novel, it is inspired by the generic and banal. As a perfect marriage of pragmatism and cultural excess, the TV dinner represents a culinary baseline that spans nearly fifty years. Its origins can be traced to middle America in the early ‘60s and various processed food companies.

But the exact moment of the TV dinner’s invention is vague, not unlike the processed foods sealed within. As an archetype and common denominator of Western Pop culture, the TV dinner spans our collective nostalgia with conflicting sensations of comfort and disgust.