Jell-O-ephemera: San Francisco Cityscape

Artist Liz Hickok makes your Friday complete with a Jell-O San Francisco, from this jiggly Palace of Fine Arts to a melting Marina. Melding the blurry, children's book perspective of tilt-shift photography with the saturated, translucent colors that define the California dream, Hickok has hit on something remarkably luscious (and fruit-flavored).

Hickok says,

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. (source).

San Francisco is the perfect city for this project. The bold shapes and colors of the Jell-O would do for LA, sure, but Jell-O itself is the wrong medium for the unforgiving exposure (in many sense of the word) of Southern California. The springy, fresh Jell-O would desiccate into wrinkled, aged rubber in no time. San Francisco, with its fogs and quirky mystery, is a much more hospitable home to the ephemeral and unreal - without fading all the way into the lush-yet-subdued hues of Oregon and Washington (which would basically have to be all blue and green Jell-O. Boring!)