Jell-O, Out of the Mold
Treats - often filled with fruitsand crowned with whippedcream - became associated
with American female domesticity. Starting in the 1920s, Jell-O was advertised to women as an affordable diet trick; in the 1950s, as a dinner-party dessert; in the 1970s, as a quick treat for independent women who were too busy to cook.
It's fitting, then, that several queer and female artists are now revisiting JellO as both subject matter and material, creating work that challenges society's fixations on traditionally feminine realms and behaviors. The New York-based photographer Joseph Maida also questions who and what belongs in the kitchen in his 2014 "Things 'R' Queer," a series of gelatin, meringue and plastic tableaus: a gelatin birthday cake atop a tennis racket, a fake hamburger with an electricity meter attached to it. They are, he writes, "historically 'straight' in their aesthetics and lack of manipulation" but "undoubtedly queer in their campy visualization of a fantasy-cum-critique of contemporary material culture."
