SCOTT HOVE: FAT GYPSY WEDDING MEETS JURASSIC PARK


San Francisco born artist Scott Hove has taken baking to the extreme with his unsettling yet refreshingly inventive cake sculptures and installations. Created in 2005, the 'Cakeland' concept was born out of Hove’s life-long fascination with the Apocalypse and artificial foods, combining these two unlikely ideas and cooking up a variety of media from wall-hangings to full-blown room installations. 




His recent exhibition, 'My Own Private Apocalypse', has been perfectly described as a bakery run by David Lynch, and the surreal exhibition prizes its walls with realistic artificial cake sculptures mostly made from polyurethane sculpting foam. Each sculpture is freakishly accessorised with fugly faux cherries, plastic insects and protruding taxidermy horns with grotesque fangs. The self-confessed animal lover says the purpose of his cakes are for a “Party for the End of the World”. Now that's an insane notion...or is it?



These tacky cake demons are supposed to disturb; combining pastel colours with viscous incisors forces us to look at something that’s grotesque and pretty simultaneously, opening up a new world of cake-contradictions. We all relate to the cake and it’s positive associations, and through Hove's work he succeeds in portraying the relationship with the "beautiful and the brutal". No one wants to see a boring artificial cake, so by adding these obscenities the sculptures become engaging and more compelling. I certainly wouldn’t want to see these beasties in my nightmares...but I can admire them from afar!

             

If you look at the rest of Hove’s retrospective, 'My Own Private Apocalypse' is clearly the R-rated edition. The crazy baker has also extended his sculptures into friendlier, more approachable cake chandeliers and interactive cake tombs. Hove also loves mixing cake decoration with found objects of the fetish variety…take a look at these absurd yet fabulous stripper shoes!

 Hove proves the medium of artificial cake holds no boundaries in his next project, a cake disco called the 'Cakeland Mirror Maze'. Now that sounds like TOO much fun....