PUBLISHED IN DNAInfo on April 2, 2010
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Dustin Wayne Harris likes cakes. And he likes women to bake them for him. This is evident in his new exhibition, Cake Mixx, at Heist Gallery. Nine large photographs lined up around a tiny room on the Lower East Side, each one a different cake, each cake a different woman.
The inspiration behind this project came several years back when Harris received a cake for his birthday. It was unsolicited, store-bought and he had no intention of eating it. It languished in his fridge for months before Harris, now 28, decided to snap a photograph one day. Although the cake was no longer its perky self, the picture turned out beautifully and sparked what became an obsession over the years.
In early 2009, Harris asked the woman he was dating to bake him a cake. She made him a purple frosted square that oozed green foam from a corner. Harris said he liked it, but it was also the most ridiculous thing he had ever seen.
“It was not even a cake you’d have on a table,” said Harris. “You’d never show or serve anybody that cake.”
Lindsey Kremkau, its baker, said the cake was a representation of Harris.
“It’s fun to look at and tastes good but it’s not very appealing or perfect in any way,” said Kremkau. “It’s like a mess on the inside, a mess on the outside but you still want to be near it, touch it and look at it because it’s interesting.”
It was the first of 20 cakes that she made him. He just kept asking for more and she kept making them without question.
“It kind of made me feel like he needed me for something, so I was happy to do it,” said Kremkau, 24.
She also made a heart-shaped cake with licorice swirls and wrapped it really tight in Saran wrap to distort and squish the bright red frosting. This one, she said, was more a representation of her.
After that, Kremkau left. She moved to Seattle and left Harris with his cakes.
Harris then went to Chloe, an on-again-off-again relationship, to bake for him. It was then that he realized the cakes were metaphors for his relationships.
Chloe’s cake, a lopsided sloppy cake with a jumble of mismanaged toppings, revealed to him that the relationship would end badly, which it did.
“Chloe turned out to be a hot mess and a perpetual victim,” said Harris. “Her cake was absolutely insane.”
After Chloe, Harris was convinced he had stumbled on a valuable tool in the arsenal of psychoanalysis – cake reading. He discovered that a lover’s cake offered great insight into the woman and how the relationship would turn out.
From that point on, at the beginning of a relationship, he would ask the woman to bake him a cake without any instruction or explanation.
“None of them did,” said Harris. “Except Gianca. She made me one but the picture didn’t work out. But we worked out, she’s still around.”
Desperate for new cakes, Harris dug into his archive of past lovers – some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in years.
“Some people were hostile,” said Harris. “Some were confused or refused.”
Many of them didn’t bake, which explains the eccentric looking ones in the show, like Kremkau’s green foam cake. She said she had no idea how to bake a cake and in a way Harris forced her to be domestic.
Harris admits he liked the idea of forcing domesticity and femininity on these women who weren’t any good at traditional female roles.
Some of them didn’t take well to that. He remembers one ex’s response to his request, “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you high?”
Teresa Baker, Heist Gallery’s director, said she thinks Harris’s project re-examines what it means to “bake your man a cake.”
“For women, now we tend to be careful about falling back into traditional roles,” said Baker. “If a man asks for one, she may be apprehensive.”
Nevertheless, Dani O’Terry, a longtime girl friend but never a girlfriend, took the task seriously, and baked an elaborate organic chocolate cake with almond whipped cream that she said took a lot of time and money to make.
“It was my way of putting attention and love into this project,” said O’Terry, 26. “I wanted to show him that I cared about this.”
However, it didn’t make the cut into Cake Mixx because Harris thought it was too boring. He said she felt duped when she found out what it was for.
“She said, ‘Why was I stupid? Why would I think you’d want to eat my cake? You don’t care, you only care how it looks,” Harris recalled.
He did only care how it looked. And that the cake was organic was completely wasted on him because he doesn’t eat cake. He just collects them. He has a huge refrigerator from the 70s in his Astoria apartment that is packed full of cakes. When asked to explain them, Harris reached up to rub his temple, struggling to summon his memory.
“It’s hard to keep track,” he said. “So many cakes. So many girls.”
O’Terry said she wasn’t surprised to hear Harris had received so many cakes.
“His relationships are very charged and really passionate,” she said. “That all these people who he’s been with did this for him says a lot.”
Some even shipped them all the way from California, where Harris grew up before moving to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts.
“Some of them did it because I think they felt guilty, like Meera,” said Harris.
“He certainly pegged me on that one,” said Meera Rangachar, who dated Harris for a brief period after she suffered the sudden death of her previous boyfriend.
She moved to New York from Los Angeles to escape it, but quickly learned she’d made a mistake and returned to the west coast just as abruptly as she had left it. Harris said she emotionally shut down and just disappeared, but he doesn’t blame her.
“I felt so bad about the way I ended things,” said Rangachar, 27. “It was abrupt and I didn’t give him the explanation he deserved.”
She said the cake she made is much like their relationship – messy and unfinished. It was a round chocolate cake that Harris photographed in front of a pale green wall that casted a somber tone to it. The sides of the cake were peeling off to reveal white cream in between the dark layers.
“Meera’s cake is very sad,” said Harris. “And Meera’s kind of a sad girl.”
Though Rangachar concedes that her cake was baked out of guilt, she said she made it because she cared for him – enough to feel guilty.
As for the volume of women who went out of their way to bake for him, Rangachar chalks it up to his charm.
“There’s something kind of irresistible about him, as completely obnoxious as he can be, he’s very difficult to say no to.”
Cake Mixx, while a mere sample of all the cakes Harris photographed, is indeed a mix. The images exhibit a varied group of women connected through one man. Each photo has a relative story behind it, but no answers are given upfront. Yet every cake, a result of an endearing gesture, speaks of the woman’s character.
Harris’s close friend and curator of Cake Mixx, Colin Huerter, said he thinks the cakes are portraits of their makers.
“By inviting his lovers to make him a cake, they inevitably reveal some essence of themselves in the process,” said Huerter.
Talia Eisenberg, the owner of Heist Gallery, said she loves how each piece exudes so much personality.
“You look at them and they don’t even look like cakes anymore after awhile,” said Eisenberg.
While setting up for the show, which goes on until April 18, she pointed out her favorite – Chloe’s doomsday cake.
“It’s pretty torn up, looks like it’s been through a lot, but in a way it’s still beautiful,” said Eisenberg.
“She has been through a lot,” Harris responded. “She is pretty torn up.”