LIZ HICKOK {JUROR’S SELECTION}

(Photo credit: Liz Hickok, Jell-O Mold #1; Juror’s Selection)

(Photo credit: Liz Hickok, San Francisco in Jell-O; Juror’s Selection)

Some people prefer Paris in black and white, San Francisco it seems is made to be rendered in Jell-O. Photographer Liz Hickok‘s dessert based cityscapes give Bay City living a precarious and literal uncertainty. Cast from Jell-O filled architectural molds, Hickok’s meticulously crafted scenes are dramatically lit and occasionally feature hand painted back drops. Quick to decay, her luminous city is at once comic and sad, always captivating.

In her own words:

I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous color and volume. The gelatinous material also evokes uncanny parallels with the geological uncertainties of San Francisco’s landscape. While the translucent beauty of the compositions first seduces the viewer, their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts.

I have always been interested in architectural scale models of cities, and how photography can play with the viewer’s sense of scale, blurring differences between the real city and the constructed one. Once I began building my own model cities out of Jell-O I found that the jiggly, iconic childhood dessert is not only perishable, but also uncontrollable. Each time I take a picture of one of my cityscapes any building may begin to sweat or even liquefy, taking on a new persona.

The video component to Hickok’s project can be seen here:

Check out the rest of this series and more of Liz’s work at www.lizhickok.com