Food Artist Brings Her Tastes to Tribeca By Carl Glassman Artist Alisoun Meehan slid into a booth at Tribakery one afternoon last month and right away pulled out a small digital camera, displaying a picture she had just taken at Tribeca Grill down the block. There, in great unappetizing detail, was the harshly lit snapshot of a dinner that had yet to be consumed by the restaurant’s hostess.   “It’s a bizarre meal. I don’t get it. A piece of bread and butter, a chicken wing and white rice. I mean, what is that?” What it may be is Meehan’s next work of art. The 32-year-old, Long Island City-based artist and food art impresario turns such dishes into 100-square-foot pastels on canvas. Meehan’s appetite for culinary subjects mostly runs to meats and sweets, from a giant, delicately colored rendering of petit fours to well-marbled T-bone steaks and the carcasses of pigs and chickens hanging in Chinatown windows. As a curator, Meehan has mounted food-themed shows in moving trucks, meat lockers, pastry kitchens and gun ranges. This month, through Jan. 6, she is curating “Sugar Craze,” a feast for the eyes if not the stomach, at A Taste of Art, the gallery/eatery on Duane Street. The show features non-edible pastels by Meehan as well as confectionary sculptures by Burr Dodd and LeRone Wilson. (A video piece by Luke Jeorger is there as well.) Meehan paired Dodd with sugar maker Ewald Notter to concoct a colorful, blinking, hand-blown sculpture of hard sugar “flowers.” Wilson, in concert with top chocolatier Andrew Shotts, made a contained of pure chocolate. Its convincingly edible-looking chocolate candy contents are made of wax. Last month, six Tribeca restaurants played host to other artist-chef matches made by Meehan, with artworks that diners could order for dessert. Having a slight bent for the macabre, she chose artist Stephen J. Shanabrook to design a dessert for Layla. Shanabrook incorporates moldings of wounds and other bodily features obtained in Russian morgues, and from them creates edible chocolate sculptures. With Layla executive chef Frank Proto, the restaurant served up chocolates formed from tooth and blister molds, almost certainly unrecognized by the diners. “He really wanted to use syringes with a sauce inside and each person would inject it into the dessert. But that was out of the question,” said Meehan. The artist has orchestrated bolder projects. Once, she filled a large blow-up pool with chopped cabbage into which two Japanese Butto dancers literally threw themselves—to the accompaniment of hip hop artist Kid Lucky. For artists, Meehan says, food is a rich subject. “Socially speaking, you can deal with obesity, starvation, lifestyle, economic standards. It’s an interesting way of dealing with cultures. Meehan, however, admits to no political bent in her own work and, though she professes to have eaten only two hamburgers in her life, she says there are no vegetarian messages in her renderings of meat. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “I never had dolls as a kid. I think of it like teddy bears, so soft. Most of us don’t relate to meat as having anything to do with an animal. When you see it in the grocery store it’s like it’s in disco pants, so tight in that Saran Wrap.” As she was talking, Meehan got an idea: install videos of slaughter houses in butcher shops. “I think it would help their business,” she said. “People would understand where the meat came from. In fact, I might propose that to a butcher shop as a piece of art.” ‘Sugar Craze” at A Taste of Art, 147 Duane St. 964-5493. Mon–Fri 12–8 pm; Sat 12–6 pm. Through Jan. 6.