My current series, San Francisco in Jell-O®, consists of photographs and videos depicting San Francisco landscapes that I’ve cast in Jell-O. To produce the landscapes, I start by fabricating scale models of the architectural elements—like the Transamerica Pyramid or the Palace of Fine Arts—out of balsa wood or foam core. I then make molds from those models, which I use to cast the buildings. My process resembles constructing a movie set, or building a sculptural installation: I add hand-painted backdrops and elements like mountains and model trees, or even dry ice to simulate fog. Finally, I light the scenes dramatically from below. Each area of the city is a different Jell-O sculpture. I make some of the neighborhoods into videos, such as Telegraph Hill shaking in an earthquake, or the Marina District washing away in a Jell-O tidal wave.

The series grew out of an earlier project, photographing architectural scale models of cities. Using photography made it possible for me to play with the viewer’s sense of scale, blurring the differences between the real city and the constructed one. While I began to build my own scale models in order to make the work more personal and to have more control over the creative process, I found that the jiggly, iconic childhood dessert is perishable and not easily kept under my control. Each time I take a picture a building may start to droop, or collapse, taking on its own personality.

When lit properly, the molded shapes that make up the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous color, volume, and light. However, I’ve discovered that the gelatinous material also evokes uncanny parallels with the geological qualities of the real San Francisco. While the translucent beauty of these compositions is what first attracts the viewer, their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts.

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