WHERE THE CHERRIES END AND THE JELLO BEGINS (2023)

CRT TV, lime jello, electronic waste

Each jello sculpture has electronic waste and shrapnel suspended in its system. The sculptures recorded reacting to environments with constant low-frequency vibration, side of highways, near train tracks, and construction sites. The video is displayed as is on one TV, and a feedback loop is established by pointing the camera input at its own screen.

Jello reveals the intimate and symbolic relationships that are cultivated between people and the world by way of the food they interact with. By viewing its latent image, we can begin to understand the production of magical, sweet, and seductive messages. The videos take after the colors and quality of Jello commercials that allowed the idea of Jello to proliferate through the Store and the Pantry.

Jello is able to suspend, absorb, and embody the vibrational space that is both bodily memory and latency. The jello body, like the human body, is subject to new sensitivities and forces. What we can learn from the jello body is the unregulated potential of a body operating freely without organizational structures imposed on its constituent parts. The jello body teaches us how to use sound to activate virtual potentials, flows, patterns, connections, and actions. The jello body is an “affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality.”[1]. The jello body negotiates shimmers with its flesh [2].

[1] Deleuze Gilles. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 121.
[2] Seigworth, Gregory J. and Gregg, Melissa. "An Inventory of Shimmers" In The Affect Theory Reader edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1-26. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2010

Exhibiting in “Digital Iridescence: Jell-O in New Media”, Oct. 28 , 2023 - Mar. 24, 2024, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Curated by Kendall DeBoer