A PECULIAR CAKE
A PECULIAR CAKE
an Outrageous Travesty by Zachar Laskewicz
based on a GIF series and a poem by Zachar Laskewicz
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https://nachtschimmen.eu
This is a complex piece of contrived graphic art that has taken a frame from a film and screenshots and photographs from various locations (stop motion image of tulips gradually dying, an artnouveau facade in Ghent, various jellyfish), then formed them into an artwork. This final image was made by staking image upon image of various different layers that I have applied different filters to. I think there were in total about 10 layers undreneath the embossed golden front layer.
This artwork, as most of artworks, didn't grow spontaneously from one source. It's history stretches backwards quite far into my life.
Here at the bottom you can read a short poem that I finished when I first started working on the GIF series and this artwork and it inspired the final product, making me connect the image of the piano player with a recurring theme: of confusing the peculiar cake and the sky's pie.
I actually wrote it to accompany this image based on a subset of the SCYPHOZOA COSMOS GIF Set called "Absurd Person Singular".
I'm taking this chance to pair it with this word play that is also explicitly pointing out the distance you should put between the things I create and the things I believe.
The metaphors I use in the poem to express this include imagining that believing in a flight of fiction is as ludicrous as pigs sprouting wings, and also of little pigs who are prepared to mistake a lie for reality.
Wȟat was my train of thought?
When observing the absurdity of the act of the creation of this very impossible GIF, I couldn't help noticing how a lion's mane jellyfish looks like a cupcake...
...Which made me think back to the time I created the poster "A Peculiar Cake"...
...Which I had created thanks to the film I made called "The Corrupted Endeavour: an objective lesson in coherence or an incoherent object lesson" ...
...Which was based on the filming of a performance in Finland of a composition for performer and tape called "Meanwhile on the Tower...
...Which was in turn based on a music-theatre composition called "The Object Lesson" for five wind players...
...Which was in turn based on an absurd surrealistic children's book by Edward Gorey sharing the same name.
"The Peculiar (Green) Cake" gradually became a symbol of the absurdity of my creations but also the tendency of people to mistake the absurdity for reality. That's when I realized that offering the peculiar cake for others to eat, could result in them thinking that I was as crazy as the people in my stories.
I'm offering a peculiar cake. You're mistaking it for a pie.
The suggestion here is that to consume my pie in the sky, you have to be able to get to it first.
And for the purpose of saving yourself from plummeting, please don't attempt flying!
FLYING WITH PIGS
[or]
MY PIE'S SKY'S LIES
At first I thought
That pigs might fly
Before you'd eat
Of my sky's pie...
But when pigs flew,
I saw you with them
Flying!
Though flying's
Not a Game for things
Like pigs and pies
(which don't have wings),
Foolhardily,
I saw you flew
The sky in!
For little pigs
with safety lost
Believing lies
At such a cost?
Like them
You should now
Know that life is
Fleeting...
Please learn to read
My metaphor
Is just a thought
and nothing more
The cake I share
Is just not there
For eating...
