Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

By Zoe Banks, BAVC Training Advisor

For the second installment of FOCUS, the BAVC Interview Series, we sit down with photographer, instructor and multimedia artist Liz Hickok. Gaining worldwide attention with her landmark San Francisco in Jell-O photography series, Ms. Hickok’s work will be featured in Rohstoff, BAVC’s first digital imaging exhibition which opens February 20th. If you want to meet Liz and see some of her work, you can also join us at the opening reception of Rohstoff on Thursday, February 28th from 6pm to 8pm here at BAVC.

What you do is so unique. Can you tell me about your process?

First, I make balsa wood or foam core buildings and carve little elements out of the balsa wood like windows and doors. Then we paint them up with jesso and seal them up with gel wax so that they’re completely sealed. Once those are finished, I make a little mold of them. To cast the mold using silicone rubber, it’s a two-part mixture, and when you mix it together it starts to activate and harden. So the models are sitting in a tray, and you just pour the silicone on top. It hardens overnight and then I put in the Jell-O. Some of my pieces are made out of clay, for Scottsdale, for instance, I made cacti out of clay.

I didn’t know you did Scottsdale and landscapes outside of San Francisco?

That’s the only one, so far. Scottsdale Public Art commissioned me to come do a piece there. They commissioned me to come down and I made two very large sculptures of two different areas of Scottsdale out of jell-o. They were actual sculptures, and in the background I had a very large print of Camelback Mountain, this iconic mountain range in Scottsdale that looks like a camel.

Do you shoot here in this studio?

I’ve only been in this studio for a few months, so I do my newer shoots here. I was at Blue Studios on Mission & 17th, so most of my work I put together in my studio and shot there, but a few of them were down for a show so they were shot on site, like at the Exploratorium, or my current show at Marin Headlands.

Which piece is that?

It’s of the Mission District and it’s more about decay. In the Mission we’ve got such dividing lines between areas. So between Valencia Street and Dolores, the buildings are made out of gel wax, which doesn’t change and just stays nice. And then for Mission Street down to here, it’s actual Jell-O, so it’s hardening and melting and molding.

What inspired the cityscapes?

I had been working on a different project before and photographing the scale models of cities that other people had created, usually for museums. Some of them are really amazing and elaborate and on a grand scale. There’s one of the five boroughs of New York and Queens that was really amazing. The first one I saw was in Havana, Cuba when I was on a trip there. It was as big as three of my studio spaces and all the buildings are teeny so it covers a huge amount of space. It was really beautiful because every so often the lights would go down and the lights in the buildings would come on and it would all sparkle on a cycle. I had a lot of fun playing around with scale and what’s real and what’s not because when you take a picture and remove it from the room it’s in, you can’t tell if it’s real or fake or how big it is. When I got to grad school, it made sense for me to start making my own cities instead of taking pictures of other people’s creations. I wanted to make them more personal, make it more my own. Rather than just making a scale model out of wood or bronze I wanted to integrate color and light. I was thinking about using resin, which is a great material, but it’s really really bad for you. I was trying to think of an alternative to using resin that integrated color and light and transparency in a similar way and I just sort of stumbled across the idea of using jell-o, which turned out to be a much more exciting material. It’s very easy to use, it’s non-toxic, but it integrates a lot of other ideas and unexpected levels of meaning that you would never think of in some more traditional materials. The idea of a temporary sculpture, an edible sculpture, a sculpture that you can smell, and a lot of those themes are really fascinating when you incorporate that with a city, a city that is temporary . . . especially over the last five or ten years we have had really insane reminders with the tsunamis and the earthquakes and the floods and the hurricanes, that our cities are not permanent. I like to introduce that theme, but at the same time incorporate a real element of beauty and humor. You take the theme of an earthquake or a flood and its paired with this sort of funny element that’s unexpected but also makes it a little easier to digest.

People think that it’s so whimsical because its jell-o which has all these connotations of childhood, but really there’s so much meaning behind the photo that people ascribe their own meaning to. I love how sometimes you zone in on the details of a particular building but sometimes it’s much more scaled-back.

It’s true. With Ferry Building or Alamo Square they focus in on the little details which make them very surreal, and others, like San Francisco, are very abstract and just shapes and colors, less identifiable, just a hint that it’s San Francisco. It’s much more about the atmosphere and the fog and although it doesn’t look like San Francisco, you get a sense that it is. I think it demonstrates how much information we actually need to make a city recognizable, to make a city look like a city, something that we know thats familiar to us theres very little information that we actually need.

Going from being a photographer of other people’s work to now actually being on both sides of it, creating the content and then photographing it, was that a difficult transition  in terms of taking total responsibility for what’s on both sides of the camera?

It felt like a really natural transition. Ever since I’ve been formally studying art, I would often make things that I would photograph and then shine light through, and then photograph again. So I look back and see there’s a definite pattern of making things which I photograph, and then mess with, and incorporate into my artwork. I have always studied photography. It’s always been something that’s been very much a focus of my artwork but even in undergrad I enjoyed a very multi-disciplinary way of working so I was doing book-making and video and installation.

You can tell that so much work goes into each photograph, that it wasn’t a passive thing, that it’s very hands-on and that a lot of work and a lot of joy goes into each piece. How do you think digital photography has affected the way you work?

It’s a struggle with digital versus working in film. Unless I had tens of thousands of dollars to buy a really high-end digital camera, the quality of digital just has not caught up to a 4×5 piece of film, it is not the same still in terms of large format printing. Film has a quality that can’t be beat; however the process is not intuitive to me. I much prefer working in digital, you can take a lot more pictures, be free and flexible, and you can play in a way that you can’t with 4×5 cameras. 4×5 cameras are so big and bulky and you can’t see the results right away, it’s expensive. You can’t shoot eighty shots in one night. You have to shoot three. I find film frustrating in that way so I go back and forth. I shoot digital and film. Film is definitely a better way to get a really beautiful, large print and in a way film is good for me because it forces me to slow down and really think about the composition of the shot in a much more deliberate way. But I like how in digital you capture things you wouldn’t have expected.

Has teaching affected the way you work?

I think teaching Photoshop is very important and teaching in general is very important. I love working with students. In a practical sense, it keeps me on my toes. I use Photoshop in my art all the time, almost on a daily basis. I love using Photoshop and that’s why I love teaching it. I think my students can tell that I love using Photoshop in a weird way, in a very geeky way. Teaching it also enhances my skill level in terms of creating my own work. Brushing up on advanced techniques informs how I work on my own art and improved my productivity. That’s very helpful. Now I’m teaching digital photography which is so fun. It’s a whole other way of teaching and so fun to see how students take pictures and what they want to take pictures of. Then on a practical level, just having to explain how to take pictures and how to keep Aperture and F-stops and the zone system in mind is good for me, good to keep them alive in my own work.

I love talking to our instructors at BAVC because so many, like you, are artists who are in a position of having to articulate these creative processes that are, for most people, totally unspoken and usually very private. I think it’s so amazing to have all these instructors who are so talented but also able to share what they love to do and how they do it and help others.

One of the best parts of this last Digital Photography class that I taught was that it was a really rainy weekend so I brought the students over to my studio which is right across the street from BAVC and they got to see what I do and how I work and I think they enjoyed that .

Where are you going next with this?

I think I’m going to start working on Las Vegas in Jell-O.

Wow.

I’m very excited. I think it really fits in terms of the idea of a temporary city. I’m thinking of using the term Digestible City. The idea of a city being digested and eaten and decayed. Las Vegas is definitely a city of food and sin and light and the crazy out-there feeling of it, especially in terms of the city drying up and getting covered in sand and working on themes of opulence and decadence. They build these crazy structures that should never be in the middle of a desert, they should never be there. I want to do a video as we go along. I envision watching this beautiful, elaborate city drying up into shriveled bits and bones. The latest video I did is a video about global warming. I shot a video where the skyscrapers all melted and the water level rose.

Was that time-lapsed?

It was. Part of it was real-time, just literally taking heat guns and melting it. But the water level rising, that was time-lapsed.

Ms. Hickok currently teaches Photoshop and Digital Photography classes at BAVC. More information about Ms. Hickok’s work can be found at www.lizhickok.com