(((Happy Birthday)))
In part three of It Is Your Birthday., James Saxon and Philip Ringler (Relaxing Realism) set cakes on fire and watch them explode. Filmed with a high-speed camera and shown in slow motion, each detonation becomes both violent and hypnotic. Sugar, frosting, wax, and flame scatter into delicate constellations across the screen. The projected images hold the viewer inside a paradox: destruction revealed as beauty, chaos slowed into serenity.
The birthday ritual is designed to be fleeting: candles lit, wishes imagined, candles extinguished, cake consumed. By turning that moment into an elongated spectacle of collapse, (((Happy Birthday))) asks what happens when the expected script is disrupted. What is released when the expected performance unravels?
The videos are not merely anarchic gestures, but meditations on spectacle, patience, control, and surrender. The cake, symbol of communal joy and obligation, is recast as a fragile architecture, its collapse captured with clinical precision and projected at monumental scale.
Like the previous works in this series, (((Happy Birthday))) examines the contradictions of celebration: how ritual both comforts and constrains, how joy is both authentic and compulsory. Here, the birthday cake is no longer consumed by people, but by a rapidly expanding pressure wave of gas and fire.
Huge THANK YOU to Andy and his amazing crew at Orlando Special FX for allowing us to use the space, acquiring, installing, and setting off high-grade explosives, and for getting birthday cake EVERYWHERE! You all are the BEST!
Thank you to the fabulous and wonderful Jesse Quattro for allowing us to use her hauntingly beautiful song, “Happy Birthday” for the website and when we do video installations.
