Untitled (Taxi Cake) by Camille Holvoet, ca. 2009-12, oil pastel on mat board, 17.25 x 16 inches, SOLD
What if a cake could cure the coronavirus?
Presented by guest curators Jordan Stein and Lindsey White at the CE gallery and on Artsy
While this past year hasn't given us much to celebrate, Camille Holvoet—a Creativity Explored artist since 2001—continues to craft dizzying beautiful cakes on paper from her home in San Francisco.
And now that we can finally smell an end in sight, it's a rich occasion to admire her sweetly complex creations, which often share the frame with written enthusiasms, frustrations, and memories, and even shoes, eyeballs, and flames. If we can’t gather everybody together just yet, at least we can get all the cakes in the same room.
Buy art, win cake
In celebration of celebrating together again soon, the curators are offering a visit from a real Cake Taxi with actual cake and a friendly hello for four lucky patrons. Purchase any artwork from the show to be entered into the drawing – Open to Bay Area residents only. Winners will be contacted before the show ends on June 12.
But wait, there’s more
The first 20 patrons to purchase artwork from Cake Taxi will receive a free Camille Holvoet Party Pack to celebrate your new art – including a custom banner, stickers, wrapping paper, plates and forks for five. One party pack per customer, received with your artwork after the show ends.
Watch the Curator Talk
Every cake has a story to tell, and according to Camille Holvoet, some of them even take taxi rides.
Join us for a special conversation to celebrate Cake Taxi, the latest exhibition on view at Creativity Explored, featuring dozens of Camille Holvoet’s cake-themed artworks.
Guest curators Lindsey White and Jordan Stein will share a slice of their career in the alternative arts arena, why they were instantly attracted to Holvoet’s drawings, and what drove them to offer to deliver creative cakes to art patrons.
Moderated by CE Curator and Exhibition Coordinator Cléa Massiani.
“We met Camille via Zoom, and when we asked about her recent cake drawings, she immediately had a question for us: 'When can we come back to the studio?' With CE closed, it occurred to us that we could blast an indelible slice of studio energy into the world; maybe Cake Taxi was the recipe."
-Lindsey White
About Jordan Stein and Lindsey White
Jordan Stein is a curator based in San Francisco and author of the forthcoming Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada and Other Pieces (Soberscove Press, 2021). He operates the exhibition space Cushion Works, serves as Public Programs Curator at KADIST, and has independently organized exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; Artists Space (New York); Yale Union (Portland, OR); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; San Francisco City Hall; The Glass House (New Canaan, CT); Matthew Marks Gallery (New York); Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco); and more. He has taught at Williams College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts. Press from recent projects has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Everglades City Mullet Rapper.
Lindsey White is an artist and educator based in San Francisco. She has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Arts Commission; Sydhavn Station (Copenhagen); Bolinas Museum; Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco); ACME (Los Angeles); White Columns (New York); Locust Projects (Miami); San Francisco International Airport Museum; Museum Bärengasse (Zurich); and more. White received SFMOMA's 2017 SECA Award and has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito) and Kala Art Institute (Berkeley). White is an Assistant Professor and Photography Department Chair at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 2019, Stein and White curated Brian Belott’s RHODASCOPE: Scribbles, Smears, and the Universal Language of Children According to Rhoda Kellogg at San Francisco City Hall. Alongside David Kasprzak, they co-founded the interdisciplinary collaborative Will Brown, which realized over three dozen exhibitions and programs in their Mission District storefront from 2012–2015 before working with other organizations. Will Brown is the author of Bruce Conner: Brass Handles (J&L Books, 2016).
Cake on Fire by Camille Holvoet, 2012, pastel on mat board, 10 x 16 inches, available on Artsy
About Camille Holvoet
Camille Holvoet in the CE studio. Photo by Evguenia Shtill.
Camille Holvoet's artwork is deceptively sweet. Her practice tends to draw on remembrances of life's anxieties and forbidden desires. Holvoet’s process is an endless discovery, in which – through repeatedly drawing in oil pastel her sacred objects: desserts, Ferris wheels, and crossed eyes – the pressures of the past are relieved by the joy of the creative process.
When Holvoet combines text with imagery, the resonance between the two is powerful as it is beautiful. Vibrant renderings of cakes and pies are overwritten with recollections of nightmares, fears, frustrated sexual feelings, and religious doubt. In the studio Holvoet offers gems of wisdom, “We like to act silly sometimes in order to be serious every day".”
Read more about Holvoet in Priscilla Franks' Huff Post piece, "A 63-Year-Old Artist Explains How Art Can Cure Creative Hunger at Any Age," and in Alissa Greenberg's "The Art of the Bittersweet" in BrutForce.
