Remember that famous Will-Ferrell-as-Harry-Caray line, “We all know that the moon is not made of green cheese. But what it were made of barbecue spare ribs, would you eat it then? I know I would.” In the spirit of that rhetorical quip, what if the White House was made of Jell-O? Would you eat it? I know I would. And I’d go back for seconds.
San Francisco-based artist Liz Hickok has made my gastro-architectural fantasy one step closer to reality. She creates miniature Jell-O versions of the White House, New York, San Francisco, and other cities around the world. When her delicious, jiggly worlds are complete, she takes stunning photos, and lets the whole thing dissolve into a poetic mess.
Inspired by visiting different cities around the U.S., Hickok casts them in Jell-O to give them an ephemeral quality — the reality being that the city is much more rigid and physically stable. While Henry Hargreaves and Caitlin Levin sought to express the materiality in their ‘gingerbread museums,’ the fragility of the gelatin suggests that buildings and cities may be ephemeral after all.
© Liz Hickok
The process is arduous: Each building must first be constructed as a mold made from a range of materials such as balsa wood, feathers, silicone rubber, and foamcore. (Once they’ve served their primary purpose, the molds become the subject of another of Hickok’s series.)