"ONCE AGAIN, Thedra Cullar-Ledford has taken a break from her stainless steel pets and Brancusian post-modernism in order to take us to the altar and see how we commit. The ordinary wedding cake is a transient monument, a telescoping spotlight on the short end of which we find the bride and groom in plastic effigy, while the sugared infrastructure upon which they stand is pecked away by the greedy hands of loved ones. As a metaphor this cake is too flat, stodgily reaching upwards to flag down whatever absolute power exists for an imprimatur on the marriage vow, a second altar, maybe, a model for the hierarchy of husband-to-wife or wife-to-husband as the case may be.

The wedding cake is a delightful miniaturization, a pain-staking artifice, and a necessary display of wealth. But a rented cake in a rented hall adored by a gaggle in rented tuxedos and awaited at last by a rented limo brings us to the crux (or the aleph, or the knot, or the fertile crescent) of the sacrament, credit.

Economics: Lesson 1.

You arrive from the office, or your home, or the road, or the field, or the dorm room, or the sprawling estate, and you want to stop, take it in as a whole, and then let your eyes linger on each level and every part of this mock-up cake, the hard-hats, the climbing ropes, the champagne flutes, and the stanchions. Funny, or depending upon your need for it, Clever.

A sense of humor created this disassemblage, and engaged to something else, like desperation. Read the bill on the wall.

In Defense, A Good-looking Corpse.

Thedra's sculptural practice depends upon her methods of enclosure,
ingenious steel and stone sarcophagi, in which she preserves memory,
personal and common, owned and borrowed. Movie-loosed tears, mother's milk, greasy pillowcases, and other discharges are among the many fluids and solids that she would immortalize. Each of these presented in minimal frames, sleek zoological display cases, modernist coffins. After these, it was only natural that she move on to the pharoah's tomb, the pyramid.

Economics 2.

Fountains and artists are both symbols of wealth. The champagne fountain trickles away a bubbly dowry for every bride lost to chance.

Something Else to Talk About at the Water Cooler!

This wedding facsimile plays off our perennial fascination with artistic similes, conceits, and elaborations. From the vegetable-faces of Archibaldo to the beg-borrow-and-steal appropriation techniques of contemporary artists, we love to the follow the ingenuity of the artist's mind as she makes something recognizable out of something else.

Aztec Sacrifice, or the Temptation of St. Anthony.

Thedra has made cakes before, angel food cake, chocolate cake, devil food cake, carrot cake, pound cake, and left them to rot alongside popular running trails so that passing joggers could think about dessert while they ran off unwanted pounds. These cakes acted as scales on which vanity was measured against the pleasures of the flesh.

This cake also hides a moral scale, a metaphor for our luckless outreaches into credit. How surprised and how indignant can we be at the statistical failure of Western marriages when we rely so heavily on a memory that was rented at the going rates of the photographer, the florist, the venue, the caterer, the party supply company, and the band?"

--Tex Kerschen