For this group of photographs I turned my camera away from my sculptures of San Francisco in Jell-O and focused it on the scale models, molds, and props that I constructed to make them. The images provide a glimpse of the labor-intensive process involved in making the sculptures and the deceptively strange materials I use, such as balsa wood, silicone rubber, foam core, and feathers. However, one does not need to know about these objects’ history to appreciate them.

In contrast to the glowingly saturated and chaotic San Francisco in Jell-O series, these photographs are quiet, minimal, and monochromatic. Their simplicity, along with the large scale of the prints allows the viewer to observe the objects’ formal beauty. One can plainly see fingerprints on the skyscrapers, or uneven arches on the Palace of Fine Arts model; but rather than being seen as flaws, they are signs of the human hand. Other details reveal the object’s humble beginnings– the strange blue rectangle has a recycling symbol in the corner, and what appeared to be palm trees floating in the breeze in my Ferry Building (in Jell-O) photograph is actually feathers stuck in a lump of modeling clay.

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San Francisco in Jell-O Statement