The Price of Eggs

Our collaborative project 'The Price of Eggs' uses a culture-crossing culinary icon to explore economic precarity, bodily vulnerability, and the fragile infrastructures of collective care.

Using the culture-crossing egg as an icon, the collaborative project The Price of Eggs explores economic precarity, bodily vulnerability, and the fragile infrastructures of collective care. Emerging in response to the political and environmental instability surrounding the 2024 U.S. election cycle, the project was created in close proximity to the artists’ shared neighborhood grocery store, Gem City Market, a member-owned cooperative opened through grassroots efforts in 2022. Through still life, documentary, and portrait photography—alongside object making, wallpaper design, and socially engaged creation—Glenna Jennings and Jalisa Robinson process historical and contemporary conditions while imagining more equitable futures.

The Infiltration series submitted for this call evokes histories of food apartheid and redlining through fragmentation, reflection, and staged transformation. Surfaces become sites of projection, and the images retain traces of spectatorship—at times suggesting that the act of looking itself is being returned. Drawing from traditions of still life while resisting their historical fixation on possession and permanence, the photographs instead embrace instability, interruption, and slippage. Framed in wood salvaged from the 2019 Dayton tornado, loss and resilience become materially embedded within the work itself, allowing the egg to function simultaneously as commodity, metaphor, and physical presence: fragile yet resilient, ordinary yet politically charged.

The images were created for a larger installation that includes documentary photographs chronicling Gem City Market’s community history alongside a wallpaper composed of 111 portraits of shoppers, members, and employees. This domestic installation invites visitors to sit and consider food as a catalyst for conversation, community, and critical reflection. Originally created for the exhibition Ohio Now! State of Nature at Contemporary Arts Center, the work is currently on view at moCa Cleveland in tandem with public programming focused on food justice and environmental sovereignty.