Pinking Index features sculptures, video, prints, and edible objects developed and facilitated by Hannah Jickling and Reed H. Reed through Big Rock Candy Mountain, their collaborative artist-run flavor incubator and taste-making think-tank. Big Rock Candy Mountain takes its name from the popular folk song that has been rewritten countless times to reflect changing comic utopia. Big Rock Candy Mountain is where we can hear a “buzzin’ of the bees in the peppermint trees, ’round the soda water fountains.” It strives to be an expanded world where adults, authority and rationality no longer define the rules and limits of what is possible.
Working with a variety of guest artists and elementary school students, Big Rock Candy Mountain produces edible editions, workshops, and installations with a focus on sensory experience. Schools become candy factories, where artists and children work together to critically riff on the cultural industries that address young people, and to create new tastes on our own terms.

Bisecting the Reid Gallery is a long, glass topped table which displays After Wrappers, the result of a collaboration with Grade 5 and 6 students from Hätrʼunohtän zho/Robert Service School in Dawson City, Yukon. After briefly critiquing industrial manufacture, and in the context of collaborative art making, students entered into multiple facets of small-scale soda production. In an extended project examining processes and materials involved in making bottles of soda, participants designed glass bottle shapes and developed soda flavour concepts. The artists then commissioned glass blower Jesse Bromm to bring these unconventionally shaped bottle designs to life. Through hands-on work, students learned that artists and designers shape our daily lives, manifesting in the gallery as a series of mono-prints made from playground garbage and the custom-made glass bottles.

SOUR VS SOUR is a chocolate bar developed with Grade 3 and 4 students at Queen Alexandra Elementary School in East Vancouver, that combines fine dark chocolate from East Van Roasters with the flavour preferences of the kids. Taking the children seriously as cultural producers and tastemakers with a potential for creativity but also for business, Jickling and Reed asked the students to think not only about the taste of chocolate, but also its production, packaging, and branding, which they explored in class as well as field trips to East Van Roasters. The artists have created a How-It’s-Made-style film about the creation of these bars.

The exhibition repurposes consumer waste as material for a printmaking project with elementary student collaborators. The exhibition includes collagraphs and monoprints created from street and school grounds refuse. These carefully and playfully collate and transform refuse retrieved from school grounds, ranging from discarded wrappers to bent straws, slick plastics, and crushed foils, into visual compositions which are brandless, quite opaque really, and avoid offering themselves as legible objects at all. Through the collaboration process, students begin to think about materials in expanded ways. They became aware that objects have a history, that packaging has evolved over the last century, and products that we take for granted are painstakingly designed.

Known for their ability to turn the classroom into an exhibition site, the artists explore the ways in which adult interference often complicates a child’s ability to choose and self-direct while acknowledging the contradictory desires arising from collaboration between generations. They aim to collaboratively create projects with students that connect in-classroom activities with artisanal processes and in-the-world discussions around key issues such as food security in an age of late capitalism, the importance of play as a learning methodology, how to challenge power relations, and where ideas of taste and value come from.