Gastro Vision: The Best in Food Art 2010

Every once in awhile something takes you by surprise. When Rachel Hines sent me this link, I was floored. The cakes on one of my favorite art blogs and in a year end list at that! Many thanks to Andrew Russeth and Nicole Caruth. [FYI: I spent the summer working on this project - the documentation can be viewed here.]

From the ART: 21 website:





"From cotton candy rooms to painterly cakes, meaty dresses to pork rind sculpture, pickle portraiture to animated toast, this year was chock-full of good “food-art” — food inspired by art and art inspired by or involving food. So much so, that it would have been gluttonous to write this year-in-review by myself. For this post I enlisted the help of two art writers who share my passion for all things food: Andrew Russeth of the blog 16 Miles of String, and Megan Fizell of the blog Feasting on Art. Together, we’ve come up with a list of the year’s best. You might want to grab a bib in case you start to drool."


Best Cake-Inspired Art: Jacinda Russell, Nine Fake Cakes & Nine Bodies of Water

“Cakes — both real and fake — appeared to make people happy and I wondered, most simply, if they could make me happy too,” artist Jacinda Russell writers in a statement that accompanies Nine Fake Cakes & Nine Bodies of Water. It’s a bewildering title, but also a perfectly self-explanatory one. Russell built cakes out of Styrofoam and a caulking gun, iced them with acrylic, and then floated them on various bodies of water. The resulting photos are brutally elegiac. Like documentation from completed performances or destroyed Earthworks, they record a work entirely beyond our grasp: a cake we could never eat, precariously balancing on the water’s surface. They are, to use Russell’s word, completely “unattainable.” They are also heartrendingly gorgeous. (AR)