cake

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, eating is one of the most basic of physiological requirements.
Food is a fundamental necessity. Cake, rich in taste and exquisite in structure, is at once something that satisfies one’s primary need of hunger and the desire for unrestrained consumption.

The argument can be made that cake is the most refined, decadent and gratuitous kind of food.
Cultures around the world integrate cake into celebrations, creating exquisitely decorated structures to ultimately be destroyed and devoured.

Filmed in real time with one continuous, unedited shot, Blaise challenged five women to have their cake and eat it too. Eat it in its entirety, in fact. Each woman was isolated in a room with their chosen confection.

At what point does an object of one’s desire transform itself into a thing of repulsion?
At what point does pleasure turn into pain?
Is transitory happiness without thought?

Symbolically spherical and absolute in form, these edible oven-baked mandalas transcend the sum of their ingredients, becoming ‘perfect’ meditations on the beauty and impermanence of all things.

This work purposefully disrupts the accepted idea that the attention span of the average viewer is severely limited. “I challenged myself to create something exceedingly long that viewers could not stop watching. I wanted to draw out the perceived sense of time even further with the added element or use of elevator muzak.”

Cake touches on reoccurring themes in Blaise’s work, such as physicality, humor, desire, limitation, perception, dissolution and loss. Also evident is reference to the Japanese concept of ‘Mono no aware’, the empathy for things passing and their ephemeral nature. An absurd universe is present in Blaises work, where subtleties, nuances, underlying emotions, and fleeting micro-expressions are highly significant and determine meaning.

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