Jawbreaker

In this series, resin-embedded jawbreaker candy, in all its colorful, glowing, translucent glory, is a metaphor for human desire. Buried inside the resin and subsequently sliced into cross sections, the concentric circles that are thereby revealed allude to the dizzying allure of material attraction and communicate the seductive cravings of the human condition. Deep cuts into the DNA of the material of each slice offer a visually compelling image with the suggestion of intrigue, especially in pieces like Sweet, whose 3-D spirals are especially mesmerizing. Jawbreaker candy is often very large and hard to ingest all in one sitting. The time and concerted effort it takes to make it to the center can be daunting. Because the comedic reference to “eye candy” suggests where this seductive path might end, it gestures toward a serious question: What kind of diet is simply junk food? And what kind might be deeply satisfying?

Hewn into various spherical shapes and other suggestive forms, the candy is a semiotic unto itself. For instance, in Juggler, a hand manages to balance 28 jawbreakers on top of each other–an amusingly improbable feat. But does the fact that it’s the hand of a skeleton hint at the toll it took to achieve it? Dust (which inspired the Drawn from Dust series) and its companion Dust to Dust, which embed the jawbreakers in graphite and aerospace documents rather than the usual resin, have a cosmic feel, leading to the suspicion that perhaps there are bigger jawbreakers out there than our minds can handle–metaphorically speaking, of course. The desire to get a taste of bigger realities, to get to the center of things, is not restricted just to our fleeting sensory desires. Such pieces as the Jawbreaker Book duo and Everlasting hint at other forms this pursuit can take, from formal knowledge to spiritual quests. Perhaps existence offers itself up to us as something sweet yet also hard; worth savoring, yes, but providing the danger of injury if we try to take a crack at it too impatiently.