Heist Gallery is pleased to announce, “Cake Mixx,” a solo exhibition of new work from the New York based photographer Dustin Wayne Harris.

Harris explains his inspiration for “Cake Mixx,”

“A few years ago, my girlfriend at the time insisted upon baking me a cake for my birthday. I begged her not to, but she (and the cake) arrived at my house wrapped in Saran Wrap, a little worse for wear. Since I had no intention of eating it, I did the next best thing: I took a picture of it. The relationship eventually sagged – like the cake. But I learned something valuable. Whereas some people consult astrologers, read Tarot cards, or tea leafs to predict the future, cakes tell it all.

The process is simple. After a first date with someone, I ask her to bake me a cake. I give no direction, but the way the cake looks never fails to become a metaphor for the relationship. Take Chloe for example: You can see from her first cake, the relationship had great promise. The second cake tells you that it ended badly. I am convinced I have stumbled on a valuable tool in the arsenal of psychoanalysis: cake reading.”

While the photographs in “Cake Mixx” are a continuation of Harris’s ongoing infatuation with the objects his lovers leave behind – a bar of soap, a hairbrush, a tangle of deflating birthday balloons – they also elevate the cakes to become not only metaphors about his relationships but also portraits of their makers. In this series of photographs, the cakes cease to be merely relics invested with all the intense beauty and suffering of memory and longing, and instead become infused with a heightened sense of uniqueness, of introspection and of self. Part of the reason for this shift in consequence is a shift in procedure: by inviting his lovers to make him a cake, they inevitably reveal some essence of themselves in the process.

At Harris’s urging, the viewer is invited to participate in a bit of cake reading psychoanalysis. Once past the initial threshold of seeing merely the objects as something Gourmet Magazine might publish, the viewer’s interior wonder begins whizzing: That cake looks professional. Bet she bought it. Then again, maybe she’s a baker. Are those layers meant to make me think that she’s complicated? Is Saran Wrap code for safe sex or daddy issues? Because the frosting is messy, she’s probably wild in bed. If she took a long time making this, does that mean she takes a long time to get ready?

The fact that Harris’s photographs play with domestic issues and the familiar trope – the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach – should give the viewer proper pause, however, for the dance of seduction – both as lovers and viewers – can make even the most sober-minded lightheaded and easily taken advantage of.

Dustin Wayne Harris is currently presenting “A New Career in a New Town” at the Art Production Fund LAB. He has been included in the group show “Seven” at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York. Harris has also been nominated twice for the prestigious Tiffany Grant. Born in Brunswick, GA in 1982, Harris was raised in Orange County CA before graduating from SVA in 2007. He currently lives in Astoria, NY.