Adrianne Rubenstein: Fruit Business draws on her family's Montreal fruit wholesale business — begun with a cart in the 1930s, growing into trucks across the city and a warehouse she raided for stickers — as both personal mythology and pictorial subject. Fruit arrives in these paintings as distilled international intrigue, a global supply chain made edible at a backyard birthday party. Broccoli enters as symbol: a miniature tree with arms cut off to fit a commercial box, its familiar shape altered for market needs, recalling the Renaissance studio trick of using vegetables as models for foliage. From fruit peddler to MFA, the paintings trace how meaning multiplies as things change hands.
