The Frosting Paintings are a series of photographs of paintings made with cake frosting. In this series, I am exploring the line that distinguishes painting from photography by creating a new process that falls into neither one medium nor the other. I made the paintings on clear plastic acetate, using six different colors of translucent frosting-gel. I then back-lit the paintings by placing the acetate on a light-table, and I photographed the paintings with the light passing through them. The photographs are shot and printed digitally but are not manipulated. The colors you see are true to the appearance of the back-lit paintings as they existed. The images-which are neither purely photographic nor purely painterly, but instead a (perhaps corrupt) hybrid of the two-create new and ambiguous spaces that invite individual interpretation. Some people see underwater scenes; others see outer space or Hubble photographs. Others have claimed to see polar bears and popcorn. The images are photographic enough to raise the question, what is this a picture of? Yet the images are abstract enough to present a multiplicity of possible answers.
The Frosting Paintings are a series of photographs of paintings made with cake frosting. In this series, I am exploring the line that distinguishes painting from photography by creating a new process that falls into neither one medium nor the other. I made the paintings on clear plastic acetate, using six different colors of translucent frosting-gel. I then back-lit the paintings by placing the acetate on a light-table, and I photographed the paintings with the light passing through them. The photographs are shot and printed digitally but are not manipulated. The colors you see are true to the appearance of the back-lit paintings as they existed. The images-which are neither purely photographic nor purely painterly, but instead a (perhaps corrupt) hybrid of the two-create new and ambiguous spaces that invite individual interpretation. Some people see underwater scenes; others see outer space or Hubble photographs. Others have claimed to see polar bears and popcorn. The images are photographic enough to raise the question, what is this a picture of? Yet the images are abstract enough to present a multiplicity of possible answers.