ARTmonday: Amy Stevens Cake Photos

I just finished putting together a sidebar of affordable art picks for the May issue of HGTV Magazine. It will accompany the feature on our Boston condo, which will focus on our art, which is everywhere. They chose 8 affordable artworks out of 25 choices I provided, so there were a lot of leftovers. I’ll eventually post all 25 picks, but in the meantime here is an expanded look at artist Amy Stevens’ cake photographs.

Stevens cake photo series, called Confections, started in 2005 as a response to her 30th birthday. She says, “It was a celebration of birthdays, color, pattern, and obsessive absurdity.”

Her original idea was to bake 30 birthday cakes for herself and photograph them. She ordered a cake decorating kit online, watched an instructional video, and quickly discovered her cakes were going to be imperfect. She decided to leave them in what she describes as “their exuberantly imperfect states.”

In the course of eight years, the series evolved into more of a humorous, feminist, conversation on life and the struggle for perfection. Amy Stevens is based in Berks County, Pennsylvania, earned a BFA from Arizona State, and an MFA from Temple University.