If you were to peek into the studio of photographer Liz Hickok (Bachelor of Fine Arts '97), you'd find Jell-O. Lots of Jell-O. Hickok mixes up batch after batch of the stuff and painstakingly molds it into panoramas of downtown San Francisco. With its fragile, temporary nature, Jell-O, Hickok says, is a fitting symbol for a city that sits on vulnerable ground. "Earthquakes are on everyone's minds here," she says. "I like to play this fun, friendly, happy medium against more serious themes."

Before dabbling in Jell-O, Hickok photographed scale models of cities built for architects and city planners. "It's like being up in an airplane, looking down at a city," she says. "It's such a sense of power, but it also helps connect the dots in a practical, logical way." During a grad-school sculpting class, Hickok decided to build her own city model to photograph; Jell-O, she says, simply popped into her head as a possible material. She built wooden models for a few generic city blocks, cast rubber silicone molds, and filled the molds with Jell-O, arranging the "buildings" on Plexiglass that she lit from below. "The jewel colors were so intense and saturated, it did something to my brain," Hickok says. The experiment was a success; her classmates ate the city.

Since then, Hickok has created several tableaux for her "San Francisco in Jell-O" series, right down to the Transamerica Pyramid, the Bay Bridge, and the Victorian homes in Alamo Square. In an exhibit last spring at San Francisco's Exploratorium that commemorated the 1906 earthquake, Hickok mounted one of her glowing cityscapes on balls so it could be gently shaken. "It's not meant to be scientifically accurate, but it might lead you to look at the city in a new way," she says.

Hickok's installations are short-lived, given the fact that Jell-O, after four or five days, grows fuzzy green mold. But her luminous, surreal photographs of the sculptures remain. "I love to look through the camera lens," Hickok says, "and see something transformed into a magical new world."

Hickok's work will be on view from July 20 through September 2 at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California.