Jell-O Art Review

Last year I never got around to posting photos of the Jell-O Art Show, in my exhaustion after the event. This year I was so much more relaxed for some reason. I got all set up to sell shirts and decorated the stage, and was ready to help when artists starting arriving. They were so darn cute in their excitement that I decided to try to photograph the artists next to their work. I only caught a few, but here they are.

One of the crowd favorites was this interactive piece by James Carwile. The  brain test on Jell-O facts was not all that easy...even your Queen got a few wrong the first time through. The brain lit up when you got the right answer by connecting the clips with the buttons for each question and answer. The piece was well-done and clever and his daughter Piper was happy to tell me about helping him do the wiring. I looked on the back and it was pretty simple all right. Great presentation. He even carefully crafted the little chocolate graduation hats on his peeps.

Piper did her own piece, and her pun on Trident was fun.Their family got the Queen's Love award for not only bringing the two pieces, but wearing Jell-O they had bought in years past, and buying t-shirts for themselves, and their mom. That's right, three generations of Jell-O Artists! You can see Piper wearing her slug as a necklace. She also ate most of a big carton of coolwhip, so maybe her taste is a little questionable, but they looked like a family to watch in the world.

Of course David Gibbs and his husband Jay attended and David did his usual tour-de-force, this time
a carved Devil's Tower landmark made of many many layers in a 5-gallon bucket. Not only that, but he put it on a rotating platform, installed two mirrors behind it with carved layered letters stuck to them, and he held court in the corner elegantly. I wish I had spent more time talking to him. Things apparently went to my head and I handed out many cards, trying to encourage lots of new people to discover Jell-O, pretty much ignoring the old people who already knew about it. It's never easy to get the balance right in the short three hours. But here is David's piece, and he said that next year will be his 20th year, so we ought to give him some kind of award too.

The letters say Close Encounters of the Jell-O Kind, and really they are quite amazing in themselves. I have spent less time than that on my entire piece some years. No, actually, I haven't, but many people have. The mirrors gave a cool dimension and interesting reflections, and he put the trimmings in a bucket for people to play with, which was highly popular. Famous artists were photographed holding them and I know one person who ate one just to prove she could. It was hard as a somewhat resilient rock, but she said it was tasty. David does like to use the sugary kind of Jell-O in his art, so that makes it even more of an accomplishment.

I got a picture of this artist's simple-looking but quite complicated sculpture, missed taking her picture, and only barely caught her at the end to ask her what the white spots were made of. She said they were gelatin made with milk, but they didn't hold their shapes in the assembly. I wonder if she made a full-on octopus or squid and then crammed it into the half-fishbowl? She said she had a hard time getting her hand in to finish it. It was one of the most beautiful pieces in it's simplicity and mystery, and I did get her name, Kari Berg, though she might not want to be that famous. Oh well, if people don't want to be famous artists they should probably not put their art on pedestals in galleries. Here's her piece, titled Homer.

I didn't even notice the green underneath until now. Great use of color and clear filler to make it complete. She showed a photo of it installed in her garden after the show, and it really looked marvelous there. I can't wait to see what she brings next year.

A word about the theme, and a request for proposals: sometimes it is hard to think of a theme with a really broad appeal and also a lot of tie-ins to a show we want to do on stage. This one worked particularly well, partly because of the classic references and the epic subjects of Homer's poem, and partly because the word odyssey includes odd, sea, and a cool spelling. Plus it means a journey. So there was a lot to work with this year, and I personally would like to be reminded of that next year when we start to talk about a theme. We actually already talked about one that might work in lots of dimensions like that, but we were drinking beer at the time so will have to bring it up again sober and see if we still laugh.

People had a satisfying number of different interpretations of the Jell-Odyssey theme. Some were really insistent about the classic references, though others appeared to ignore it completely. Jordan and his friends just made a sculpture, I think, unless I missed the reference. Maybe it was about a journey around our fair state. I asked them what motivated them to make Jell-O and they said just for something fun to do, which was believable as they looked like they enjoyed it thoroughly. It was a carefully constructed  piece. They used spices for texture so the yellow ground looked like dirt and the green parts were full of bay leaves and looked foresty. They put a big pink heart in the Eugene area and the sign used really nice lettering. An excellent effort!

 Ruby here is one of the Radar Angels and was really enthused about making a piece, which she did the night before and the day of the show, so she gets extra points for spontaneity. Her mom gets tons of points for encouragement without control. Pond Life is cute and technical, as the round green things are full of grass and daisies and the chocolate peeps add class. Ruby liked to talk about it and even pinched  pieces of it off and ate them during her explanations. I like the photo of the artist's hand, too. Never finished, always improving. She will be someone to see in future years, we hope, both in the gallery and on the stage. Very original and spunky.

 Holly is famous for her Tacky Foods, as she likes to use real gelatin recipes from old cookbooks and I always enjoy tasting them. She doesn't mind using gross ingredients like this year's, Candied Chicken Gizzards. They tasted better than most chicken gizzards which are really not bad if you don't think about what you are eating. I only ate two, but like all of the Tacky Food they were gone by 8:00.

Her piece was one of the only political statements, Odyssey to 350, which is about the atmosphere and compared humans to slugs I guess in our slow response to disaster. I didn't get a chance to really study it but it was probably full of really clever jokes and she obviously put a lot of thought into it. I missed her friend or partner Gary's display entirely but as usual he brought his very cool collection of glassware and chrome stuff and put Mr. Potato Head in Jell-O with some complex story and scenario as he likes to do. I feel terrible now that I didn't have five minutes for it. I know he took a lot of photos so I should search him out on the internet and see if I could steal some.

I got all my photos of the performance from Radar Angel Nina Kiriki Hoffman, by the way. She captured all of the highlights and not the part where my crown fell off or the  Sirens missing their cue. She had her photos up the next morning and tagged me so they all went straight to my Facebook page and are in my collection now. What a great service to humanity! Everyone must do their part. See if you can drive a little less to let Holly know we were listening, too. I mean really. Just because they had to cancel the Earth Day festival doesn't mean we can slack off and not do any Earth Daying. I know the Earth Hour was happening just as I was driving home from the show with my car full of props, so instead of driving to the after-party I walked over in the dark. Don't worry though, it wasn't a bit of fun so you didn't miss anything. All the fun was in the gallery, thanks to these brave, thoughtful, and eminently creative artists and the others whose photos I failed to get . Hooray for the Jell-O Artists!

Edited to add: if you don't get enough here, check my other blog at http://divinetension.blogspot.com