• Matthew Nash, “A Conversation with Jeffu Warmouth,” Big Red & Shiny #22, 2005
  

  Boston artist Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth is a funny guy. His work incorporates elements of children’s tv (think “You Can’t Do That On Television”) with prop comedy, Jewish humor, kung fu and cooking.

  MN: Your work combines humor with everyday items and experiences to subvert what we expect from language, culture and identity. Can you talk about how your unique brand of prop-comedy / concept-art came into being?

  JW: I began to seriously fuse humor into my work in the summer of 1995…
  READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

• Cate McQuaid, “A Vegas-style staging of the scripture”, Boston Globe, April 22, 2009
  

  Puns, parodies, and jokes have always been Jeffu Warmouth’s mainstay. Warmouth’s interactive video installation brings the viewer into the middle of a fast-food war between “Jeffu Burger” and “JFC.” Life-size videos of Warmouth in uniform, ready to serve up the shakes and fries, stand at the ready as the viewer uses a touch screen to order. One or the other will prepare the meal, as his adversary complains. The food is crazy – one server dons onion-ring chain mail to protect himself from the slings and arrows of his business – but usually there’s sly social commentary at work. It’s a whopper of an installation.

• Greg Cook, “Our digital landscape,” Boston Phoenix, April 28, 2009
  

  Warmouth’s video installation is a satiric face-off between McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken joints. You order off interactive computer menus that feature a mix of conceptual and absurdist gags. One restaurant prepares your order (which often seems to involve Warmouth dumping a bucket of chickenish stuff on his head) while the other heckles (that guy will put anything in his burgers). A serious-silly joke about fast food and conceptual art, it’s a hoot.

• Ray Hainer, “Vegetables rampage in the name of art,” Boston’s Weekly Dig, Aug 23, 2006
  

  One night back in 2004, artist Jeff Warmouth had a dream that a cabbage meteor slammed into a city and destroyed all the buildings – well, actually, he dreamed that he made a movie about a cabbage meteor that slams into a city and destroys all the buildings, and that it would be called “Day of the Cabbage”…
  READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

• Ken Johnson, “Punch, potato scientists, & ‘Sodmonsters’ at DeCordova,” Boston Globe, May 18, 2007
  

  The prize for the funniest artist definitely should go to Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth for his sculptures, digital photographs, and video documenting an outer space exploration program called “Spudnik ” developed by a race of anthropomorphic potatoes. The deadpan video describing how potato scientists learned to harness intestinal gases as a means to propel “potatonauts” on rockets to other planets is hilarious, and models of vehicles for extraterrestrial travel made from pots, pans, utensils, aluminum foil, and other kinds of kitchenware are quite clever. Warmouth would have to push his ideas to greater extremes to achieve artistic profundity, but what he has done so far is undeniably entertaining.

• Greg Cook, “Local Color: The 2007 DeCordova Annual Exhibition,” Boston Phoenix, May 8, 2007,
  also posted on The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, May 10, 2007

  No need to apologize for Fitchburg artist Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth, whose 2007 video Spudnik mixes animation and puppetry to tell its fractured tale of a Soviet-styled nation of potato people and their quest for the stars. “The desire for space exploration among the Potatoites has a long and delicious history,” the narrator explains in that optimistic march-of-progress tone familiar from newsreels and science documentaries. Warmouth’s installation includes rocket models and photos “documenting” the Spudnik program — the “Unmanned Foil Satellite” is a ball of tinfoil with three metal legs that exploded on re-entry because “engineers had neglected to poke holes in the foil to prevent steam build-up.” Warmouth’s project is a light goof on museum displays, filled with groan-inducing puns and charming Sesame Street–style humor. Sometimes it’s too light and silly, but he keeps everything short enough that it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

• Chris Bergeron, “Art Matters,” MetroWest Daily News, May 20, 2007
  

  Vincent Van Gogh might have favored oil paints but Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth uses wrinkly potatoes to create a faux Soviet-style space race featuring tinfoil-wrapped Spudniks hot off his creative Frialator. With his Salvador Dali moustache, Warmouth has created “Spudnik,” a singular multimedia potpourri that combines a potato fetish, surrealism, schlock movies and very weird humor. An art teacher at Fitchburg State College, he has reinvented the Cold War space race of the 1960s through a series of purposefully corny documentaries, photos and exhibits focused on “Spudnik,” a tinfoil-wrapped potato impersonating a Soviet-style satellite. When cosmonaut Alexandr Peelzov achieves liftoff from “three pounds of soaked lima beans” or Spudnik crashes because “engineers neglected to poke holes in the foil to prevent steam buildup,” visitors can either laugh, shake their heads or marvel at Warmouth’s warped recasting of recent history. While “Spudnik” evokes chuckles and groans, Warmouth’s spacey installation explores serious questions about how government-driven media coverage shaped public perception of the Space Race.

• Leann Leake, “15 artists exhibit in the Hampden Gallery,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, Sep 21, 2005
  

  For a touch of humor, visitors will enjoy Jeff Warmouth’s “SuperJEFFUmarket,” a three-piece sculpture made of stacks of boxes topped by cans (”560 cans, 20 boxes,” as the gallery label tells us). At first, the piece seems to be an eye-rolling redundant tribute to Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, but on closer inspection you’ll find that Warmouth has doctored the labels of all of the cans with seemingly endless creativity. The stacks of products become a tongue-in-cheek psychoanalysis of the artist, as viewers pick out cans of “Big Jeff’s Forked Tongue,” “Ripe Bitterness (pitted,)” and “Marinated Self-loathing (in bile).” It’s all very heavy-handed, but Warmoth seems to know that his self-exploration (so common now) can be wearying, and so sticks to a light touch with a lot of humor. How could anyone write this piece off, when it dismisses itself so well?

More Reviews

• M C Elish, “Nourishment, art that feeds the soul and makes strong funny bones,” Boston Cyberarts Blog, April 27, 2009
  

  I’ve been doing food-based work for a decade at this point — but I’ve never really done fast food, per se. I began really thinking about fast food as a cybernetic experience. Fast food is all wrapped up in technology. READ MORE

• Sebastian Smee, “In cyberarts, technology overrides emotion”, Boston Globe, May 1, 2009
• Greg Cook, “Andrew Witkin, Doug Weathersby: Wonk Appeal,” Boston Phoenix, January 20, 2009
  

  Local conceptual artists are an amorphous, hard-to-categorize gang. What unites them is a wonkish way of thinking that’s easier to sense than to define. Their ideas often manifest themselves through rigorous craftsmanship: Andrew Mowbray’s Jules-Verne-by-way-of-Matthew-Barney contraptions, Jeff Warmouth’s screwball puppet films and mock museum displays. Performance is often involved, and often as video. Several artists adopt poses of scientific inquiry and expedition. Many use aliases (Warmouth as Jeffu, Mowbray as Tsunami Jones), often reinventing themselves as some sort of “official” enterprise.

• Milva DiDomizio, “All aboard to lands of whimsy,” Boston Globe, Dec 27, 2007
  

  Ellen Wetmore and Jeff Warmouth’s contribution, “Land O’ Lactation,” was created in response to the recent birth of their son. “It looks kind of like a national park,” said Dempsey, “but the tops of the mountains are nipples.”

• Chris Bergeron, “Fantasies on Track“, The Daily News Tribune, Sep 23, 2007
  

  Certainly Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth provided the funniest, most unexpected creative response to Capasso’s proposal. ˇThe Fitchburg-based wife and husband, who just had a son, built “Land O’ Lactation,” a bodyscape of mammary-shaped mountains and ponds of breast milk after Wetmore observed that, after her son’s birth, her “life was taken over by her breasts.” Their imagined landscape incorporates quirky references to Mother Earth and the human habit of describing the body in geographic terms. It is head-shaking funny.

• Greg Cook, “Locomotion Commotion,” Boston Phoenix, Sep 18, 2007
  

  The train chugs on through Fitchburg couple Ellen Wetmore & Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth’s Land o’ Lactation, winding across a causeway above a milky lake poured between realistically rendered mountains. The peaks, though, resemble breasts, with milky fluid trickling from their tips down to the lake below. The piece was inspired by the recent arrival of the couple’s son. “Shortly after Alexander’s birth,” a wall text explains, “Wetmore remarked that her life was being taken over by her breasts.” This affords satirist Warmouth, who is unable to resist a cheesy joke, fertile territory (”Mozzarella Mine: Danger Falling Cheese”). It’s all too goofy to get me thinking deep thoughts about the nourishing earth, as another wall text suggests, but it does bring to mind the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, which some think were named by a French trapper who thought the peaks looked like a lady’s, uh, tetons. You’ve got to hand it to the French; hereabouts people looked at mountains and saw only the profiles of old men.

• Ben Aaronson, “Trainscape: Art in Locomotion,” Lincoln Journal, Sep 18, 2007
  

  Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth’s “Land O’ Lactation” was inspired by the biological experience of new motherhood. After recently giving birth to a son, Wetmore remarked that her life was being taken over by her breasts. That sentiment is reflected in a comical and provocative landscape made up of giant “mammary mountains” and pools of milk.

• Cate McQuaid, “Keeping Track of Trainscape,” Boston Globe, Sep 15, 2007
  

  The artists who focus mostly on landscape often falter; their work seems too simple, like the one-note “Land o’ Lactation,” by Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth, featuring mountains topped with nipples and a lake of pale milk.

• Charles Guiliano, “2007 DeCordova Annual,” Maverick Arts / Berkshire Fine Arts, May 19, 2007
  

  Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth’s send up of “Spudnik” with a video and several maquettes is genuinely hilarious. Be sure to spend time seeing the entire video even though the museum might have given us a bench to sit on. The work is indeed a very “original” and gonzo, sci fi, hypothesis of the secret life of potatoes and how they launch from dirtworld to outer space.

• “Art of Trees and Taters,” Boston Globe, May 10, 2007
  

  It’s a good thing the DeCordova Annual Exhibition focuses on variety. Otherwise, how would the curators integrate Sandra Allen’s 37-foot-tall drawing of a tree and Jeff Warmouth’s “Spudnik” installation involving space program politics and potatoes?

• “SPUDNIK lands at DeCordova,” Lincoln Journal, June 13, 2007
  

  Drawing upon a variety of media, Warmouth adds a comic twist to the DeCordova Annual. Based entirely upon a pun, his latest exhibit “SPUDNIK” pokes fun at the political history of the space program, American cuisine, and consumer culture. Visitors laugh out loud as potatoes blast into space in the “sci-fry tale of space exploration by potatoes during the Cold Storage War.” Featuring a mixed media of video, dioramas, sculpture, and photographs, “SPUDNIK” provides a humorous look at the world of produce in space.
  Warmouth works with photography, video, installations, book art, performance art, sculpture, and digital media to satirize art and culture. Other recent projects have included a televised Wild West reality/game show, video spoofs of sci-fi and martial arts movies played out by fruits and vegetables. and live full-costume Japanese monster wrestling events.

• Linda Laban, “Meet me at the museum,” Boston Globe, July 19, 2007
  

  Who would want to miss Fitchburg-based artist Jeff Warmouth’s innovative “Spudnik ” installation? Warmouth utilizes potatoes and tinfoil to present potatonauts in space.

• Karen Mann, “Food for Art’s Sake,“Fitchburg Pride, Aug 3, 2007
  

  When Jeffu is looking to cast his next production, he goes to the produce aisle of the grocery store.”It’s easier to work with vegetables, they don’t talk back,” said artist Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth with a smile on his face. The local artist currently has an exhibit, “Spudnik,” on display at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln.
  While Jeffu, whose pen name comes from the Japanese pronunciation of Jeff, said he couldn’t pigeonhole himself into one genre, his work is usually humoristic and based in food. “I wanted to make work that was accessible, that people could understand.” Jeffu started by using common household objects in his work. One of his creations was a photo of his bunny chewing on a blue broomstick. Jeffu then switched the bunny and the broom to opposite sides, took another picture, and then put the two together. “It looked like a Q-tip,” said Jeffu. The switch to using food in his art came from his love for cooking. “I was so comfortable working with food for a medium. It is like putting a recipe together,” said Jeffu. After he had been working with food for a while, he moved from photography to film narratives. “Day of the Cabbage” is a Godzilla-style monster movie, while “Il Spaghetti Occidentali” is a western.
  When Jeffu created the cookbook, “Strictly Kosher Style,” he really learned to mix food and humor. Jeffu was asked by the professor of a History of Jewish Humor course to be involved in a show the professor was putting together. “I was a non-Jew, I was invited for that reason. I was the non-Jew looking at Jewish humor,” said Jeffu. He said he did a lot of research on kosher laws so he wasn’t poking fun from the outside. He said that he always does research on a topic before using it in a humorous way. “In Jewish humor, there is a tradition of jokes that play with kosher laws,” said Jeffu. The cookbook features items like “Bagel Belly,” “Menorah Dogs,” and “Legalized Ham.”
  His current endeavor with food and humor is Spudnik, which he describes as a “sci-fry history of potato space exploration.” A sketch of a potato doing a spacewalk is what inspired him. Once he came up with the name, “Spudnik,” he said everything else fell into place. The exhibit features photos, videos, and some installation work. “Press this button to hear the actual sound of Spudnik X-1,” says audio at one of the stations.

• Charles Bonenti, “Artists Work Alone & Together,” Berkshire Eagle, Feb 7, 2007
• Randi Hopkins, “Radical Dude…the 2007 Annual at the DeCordova,” Boston Phoenix, April 24, 2007
  

  In Land O’Lactation, Ellen Wetmore and Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth create a wee world held hostage by the primal needs of infants.

• Cate McQuaid, “In Fitchburg , a marriage of art and humor,” Boston Globe, Oct 6, 2006
  

  Out here on the western frontier of the Boston suburbs is not the first place you’d think to look for artists, the crafters and critics of contemporary culture. But sculptor Ellen Wetmore and multi media artist Jeff Warmouth make their home here, and down in the basement they make their art. Lately, it’s been a busy place. “I looked at my i Cal, and realized that in a four- week period, the two of us had eight shows going on,” marvels Warmouth, who teaches at Fitchburg State College. The couple have come to a momentary stop in their living room, which is packed with plush, deep chairs and a leather sofa.
  Warmouth is easygoing and thoughtful, but his mustache — waxed and curled at either end — hints at his showmanship. He’s a prankster artist, who looks to the Marx Brothers as inspiration. The summer group show at Green Street Gallery featured Warmouth’s film “Day of the Cabbage,” a pun-filled B-movie takeoff about a giant cabbage hurtling toward Earth.
  Not everybody appreciates or understands artists. Warmouth’s father, who died earlier this year, worked for a power company. His mother is a retired secretary. Wetmore’s dad is an urban planner, her mother teaches finance. Both sets of parents have supported, if not completely understood, what their son or daughter was up to.
  “Dad got to see ‘Day of the Cabbage,’ ” Warmouth says. “There’s a bonus to doing comedy. It does have mass appeal. My dad refused to ever set foot in a museum, but even he and my mom got my work. They laughed at the funny bits.”

• Sean L. McCarthy, “Artists keep eyes on prize,” Boston Herald, Sep 16, 2006
• Big Red News Editor, “Art Showdown,” Big Red & Shiny #48, 2006
• Cate McQuaid, “Astronauts, Monsters and Silicon Flowers,” Boston Globe, Aug 17, 2006
  

  Warmouth riffs on B-movies with his overly pun-filled video installation, “Day of the Cabbage,” which looks like satire you might see in a “Muppet Show” sketch. Warmouth parses the nightmarish possibilities of bio-engineering…

• Randi Hopkins, “Scroll Down…Future Shock at Green Street,” Boston Phoenix, Aug 8, 2006
• Ben Sloat, “Astronauts, Monsters and Silicon Flowers @ Green Street,” Big Red & Shiny #47, 2006
  

  Jeff “Jeffu” Warmouth, he of the familiar Rollie Fingers moustache, presents a hilarious video with vegetable characters, Day of the Cabbage. Sort of a Godzilla meets 50s B movie Sci-Fi meets Veggie Tales (the surreal Christian children’s vegetable puppet show), Warmouth fills his Cabbage film with delicious little details (like Mr. Butternut) and subtle clues that warrant multiple viewings of his ten minute piece. Added to the HD quality and smooth animations of the video itself are the three dimensional effects of its presentation. Housed in a matzoh covered monitor and surrounded by characters from Day of the Cabbage, the video is far more experiential than the norm. Besides admiring the fabrication of the actual props and its production value, you can verbally admonish the cabbage character in person after particularly gruesome scenes! One other note is that the unexpected rumbling of the Orange Line below adds enormously to the physical experience of the video, analogous to the vibrating Playstation control, writ large.

• Cate McQuaid, “Experimenting on themselves,” Boston Globe, Feb 24, 2006
• “Alumni Profile: Roland Smart and Jeff Warmouth,” www.smfa.edu, September
• Big Red, “Art Show Down,” Big Red & Shiny #26, 2005
• Colin Owens, “ArtFilmDesign #6: Jeffu,” ArtFilmTalk.com, Nov 8, 2005
• Mary Jo Palumbo, “Electoral collage,” Boston Herald, May 15, and Cambridge Chronicle, May 27, 2004
• Holland Cotter, “Hometown of Utopia and Dissent,” New York Times, Jul 23, 2004
• Christopher Millis, “E Pluribus Museum: The Politics of Art,” Boston Phoenix, Jul 15, 2004
• Jim Sullivan & Christopher Muther, “Silly but serious,” Boston Globe, July 29, 2004
  

  Neo-hippies nostalgic for the Yippies, those acid-eating, fun-loving folks who ran Pigasus the Pig for president back in 1968, might want to check out the creation by Ravi Jain, Natalie Loveless, Jeff Warmouth, Andrew M.K. Warren, and Douglas R. Weathersby at Cambridge gallery Art Interactive. The project is called “Participatory Democracy,” and the artists have created four candidates: the Bearded Lady, Two-Headed Ed, the Contortionist, and the Great Incumbo. These characters are running for some vague, unnamed office, and you can go to the gallery and cast your vote for them. You do this via Skee-ball machine, dart shooting, a computer touch screen, or a paper ballot that’s too big to fit in the slot and is discounted if you fold it. A Hobson’s choice, indeed. A little cynical are we? “Totally,” says spokeswoman Robyn Whittington about tonight’s Last Hurrah from 6 to 9. (Folks have been voting in this carnival since May.) “The whole point is getting people to talk about voting, the voting apparatus, and the methodology not being really reliable. You can have a `say,’ but what does it really mean? We’re looking in to the heart of democracy and what it means to have a voice, but at the same time say it’s a little ridiculous: You never really have a say.” And tonight, she adds, “You can just be silly for the last time.”

• Fred Levy, “Ism or not-ism,” Big Red & Shiny #17, bigredandshiny.com, 2004
• Bill Marx, “Entertaining the DNC,” WBUR Online Arts, WBUR-FM, Jul 8, 2004
• Scoop A. Wasserstein, “The Secret lives of city-crushing monsters,” Harvard Crimson, Mar 4, 2004
• artMatters, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, artwork included in issue, 2004
• Cate McQuaid, “Mills Gallery is alive with ambitious sounds of ‘Boom Box,’” Boston Globe, Feb 16, 2003
• Aiden Fitzgerald, “Mills’ ‘Boom Box’ creates a buzz,“ Boston Herald, Jan 23, 2003
• Josh B. Wardrop, “An aural report on ‘Boom Box’,” Cambridge Tab, Jan 31, 2003
• Carlene Hempel, “His collaborative curating makes for sound art,” Boston Globe, Jan 17, 2003
• Randi Hopkins, “(Way) out of Asia,” Boston Phoenix, Aug 15, 2003
• Toni Baca, “Art Gallery opens art show Contemporary Genre,” Impact, Nov 21, 2003
  

  Warmouth combines humor with consumerism art in his “self-parodying, self-cannibalistic self-portrait.” The artist, from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, displays realistic-looking canned goods with the Jeffu brand. One can find such human emotions as Crushed Heart, Thousand-Year Ego, and Cold Blood among the art products on display. His work seems to boldly point out that “You are what you eat.” While intentionally putting a piece of himself in each can, Warmouth claims that, essentially, in his supermarket, “I am what you eat.”

• Craig S. Semon, “’New Work’ on exhibit at college,” Montachusett Sentinel, Sep 29, 2002
• Andy Levine, “Faculty showcases skills in ‘New Work,’” The Point, Oct 5, 2002
• Kate O’Neil, “Professor Profile Series: Jeff Warmouth,’” The Point, Nov 15, 2002
• Scott Speh, “Hot Commodities 12,” Hot Commodities #12, Feb 14, 2002
• Jessica Rosen, “Monster Wrestling: Kaiju Big Battel,” Free Williamsburg, June (issue #27), 2002
• Cate McQuaid, “’Lighten Up’ makes art funny business,” Boston Globe, Apr 14, 2001
  

  Most people take art seriously – maybe too seriously. The DeCordova Museum hopes to change that with “Lighten Up: Art With a Sense of Humor,” a show that aims for your funny bone. [...]
  Many of the artists take off from popular culture, including (nod to Warhol) mass marketing. Jeffu Warmouth’s “Super Jeffumarket” is boxes and supermarket shelves full of cans presumably filled with the artist’s own tasty personal byproducts: “canned lungs,” “raw nerves,” and “drained self-esteem.” It’s all in the packaging, we’re told, and in packaging himself, Warmouth somehow sadly reinvigorates his self-esteem.

• “Local comic’s advice to artists at Decordova,” Boston Globe, Apr 14, 2001
  

  The critic has spoken. But what would a comedian say about “Lighten Up: Art With a Sense of Humor?” In his best “artistic” beret, local comic Rich Ceisler cruised through the galleries. He arrived with expectations: “The image of an artist submitting his comical pieces to the museum board, sweating and tugging at his tie a la Dangerfield, muttering ‘tough curator’ is what comes to mind,” he said before he went. Here’s what he had to say after:
  “I enjoyed Jeffu Warmouth’s collection of tin cans with creative labels such as ‘Forked Tongue,’ ‘Peeled Toes,’ and ‘Crushed Resolve.’ Obviously to be enjoyed with a fine Chianti and fava beans.”

• Leon Nigrosh, “Laugh at them: Funny art at the DeCordova,” Worcester Phoenix, Mar 16, 2001
  

  For sheer invention and outright laughs, Boston media artist Jeffu Warmouth’s Super Jeffu Market evokes a growing series of grins, snickers, and chuckles. Andy Warhol (1928-1985) may have copied Brillo boxes, but Warmouth gives us a whole supermarket isle of shelves crammed with cans of “Rolled Eyeballs,” “Forked Tongue,” “Bruised Ego,” and more, running a full 25-feet long. Each can label is made up to look like the real thing, with ingredients, guarantees, net weights, and the appropriate pictures for products like “Shaolin Fist” and “Peeled Toes.” This display has proved so popular that a variety of the products are actually for sale in the museum’s store. What better way to enjoy the show than to take home a can of art humor for only $9.99?
  Leave some time to watch the short videos. Jeffu Warmouth’s Kung-fu Kitchen is a hilarious chop-socky battle between an eggplant samurai and an evil cabbage warlord.

• Mary Sherman, “DeCordova gains wit with show,” Boston Herald, Feb 4, 2001
  

  With many politicians still convinced that culture is as much of a threat to public life as guns or poverty, getting art to lighten up seems long overdue. So the DeCordova Museum’s “Lighten Up: Art With a Sense of Humor” is most welcome. The show provides a solid dose of wit and mischievousness at the time when the art world could sorely use it.
  Canned goods provide a visual pun in Jeffu Warmouth’s elbow macaroni label, which sports human elbows instead of pasta. “Rather than be reconstituted by these products that I ingest and invest in,” Warmouth says, “I want to put a little bit of me in every can.”
  Teddy Dibble parodies TV ads in a hilarious series of videos in which a quite ordinary person is coached in how to kiss (”Rules of Kissing”) and in ways of coughing (”The Cough”). Much sillier is Warmouth’s low-tech video “Kung-fu Kitchen,” a kind of Japanese B-movie send-up in which vegetables and fruits, with names like “Oh Ran Ji” and “Ah-Po,” vie to become emperor.

• Robin Vaughan, “Humor is art form,” Boston Herald, February 9, 2001
  

  A couple reads the joke product names in “Super Jeffu Market,” a sculpture installation by Jeffu Warmouth. The artist, a member of the Boston-based art-school-wrestling team Kaiju Big Battel (members dress like Japanese monster-movie characters and stomp styrofoam cityscapes and each other), doesn’t shy away from making statements. How the messages are interpreted is anyone’s guess.
  “Oh look, honey,” says a DeCordova guest, reading a label aloud to her husband, “crushed resolve!”

• Mark Lynch, interview, “Inquiry,” WICN-FM Radio, Worcester, MA, Mar 5, 2001
• Orin ben-David Baal, interview, “All Things Considered,” WBUR-FM Radio, Boston, 2001
• Christine Temin, “’Witness’ gives varied visions of Holocaust,” Boston Globe, Jan 26, 2000
  

  At the Starr Gallery of the Jewish Community Center in Newton, guest curator Louis Kaplan has put together a show called “Distinguishing/Distinguished Jewish.” The six artists examine everything from circumcision to bagels, and, as the latter suggests, Jewish humor plays a part here.
  Jeff Warmouth is the jokester of the show, the gross-out guy. Among his Catskill-worthy “Strictly Kosher Style: Recipes Spiced With Jewish Humor” are lurid color close-ups of him grabbing a round portion of his ample belly, right around the navel, turning it into a bagel onto which he slathers cream cheese and lox. As well as poking fun at Jewish dietary laws, Warmouth questions rules that don’t always seem to make sense, even to some Jews.
  Judging from his tummy, Warmouth could do with a workout on the treadmill that is the focus of Zach Feuer’s “A Walk in the Desert”…

• Christopher Mills, “Art, Jews, and the Holocaust,” Boston Phoenix, Jan 28, 2000
• “Al Cinema Su Internet,” MediaMente, www.mediamente.it, Mar 24, 2000
• Kevin Talbot, “Live Monster Wrestling!” Weekly Dig, May 10-17, 2000
• Karen Sparacio, “Everybody was Kung-fu Dancing,” Somerville Journal, Jul 22, 1999
• “Movies Online: Kung-fu Kitchen,” ZDTV, Oct 1, 1999
• T.J. Medrek, “Stellar Dweller,” Boston Herald, Sunday, Mar 21, 1999
• Christine Temin, “Fun House,” Boston Globe, Apr 1, 1999
• David Wildman, “New gallery is for the up and coming,” Boston Globe, Jan 25, 1998
• Red Letter, literary magazine, Spring 1997, cover art, 1997
• David Wildman, “More frightening than the cookie monster?,” Boston Globe, Jun 8, 1997
• Mary Sherman, “At Mills Gallery, home is where the art is,” Boston Herald, Mar 16, 1997
• Cate McQuaid, “There’s no place like home…” Boston Globe, Mar 29, 1997
• “Reading the Image,” Tufts Journal, vol. 16, no. 8, 1995
• Museum School News, cover art, vol. XVIII, no. 2, Spring 1995
• Frederick Kalil, “Expect ‘The Unexpected,’” Tufts Journal, vol. 16, no. 5, 1995
• John Carlos Cantu, “Post-modern classics from Warmouth,” Ann Arbor News, Aug 25, 1994
• Marsha Miro, “Art for the Holidays,” Detroit Free Press, Dec 7, 1993