Artist Spencer Merolla uses cupcakes and baked goods as a metaphor for perilous obsession. Merolla constructed “pastries” of coal ash, resin, ceramic, fabric, and paper into an artwork entitled “Coal Comforts,” part of a group exhibition at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn.
Here is the entire artwork.
Merolla explains as follows:
Coal Comforts is a concept ‘bakery’ in which familiar sweets are replaced with inedible versions made from coal ash. An evocative material, ash suggest both personal mortality (ashes to ashes, cremation) and communal annihilation by way of mass destruction.
Nostalgia persuades us that what is familiar is innocuous. In so doing it masks a harmful reality—that our overindulgence in fossil fuels has been—and will be—our undoing. In essence, nostalgia is a toxic habit we collectively can’t seem to kick. In the years since I began this series, conversation about climate change has given way to desperate pleas for action around the world. And yet we cling to the old ways of doing and of being and of consuming, well past the point of absurdity. Coal Comforts is a bakery full of comfort foods that have no comfort to give.
Artist’s statement
A bakery owner once said to me, “Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake.” I beg to differ and so does Merolla. There is always symbolism, be it subtle or overt.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 