Are these artworks a delicious bite out of capitalism? Or are they cake?

Alexander Long – a Bakersfield born artist who is currently based just 4 hours away in Oakland, California – makes cakes. It might not be a cake you want to eat, considering they’re made out of materials such as acrylic and oil paints, beeswax, plaster and concrete, but it’s most certainly a cake you want to look at.

With beautiful arrangements of “piping frosting” that replace the clichéd metallic and serrated edges of modern sculpture, Alexander’s sculptures are refreshingly twee and endearingly strange – the images encased within these gateau-esque decorations range from the humorously pointless; cowboy boots, decorative knives, and stone pillars to liminally digital; night vision footage, stock imagery and thermography. Alexander never ceases to evolve his style, as a selection of his 2025 works feature his own cakes taking center stage inside the sculptures – a kind of meta cake. A multi-layered cake, if you will. “Growing up on the rural edge of Fresno, I became acutely aware of the aesthetics of American capitalism as the land around us was bought by developers and turned into tract housing and retail chains, forming a kind of corporate monoculture,” shares Alexander. “I’m interested in how these corporations advertise and use imagery to manufacture desire, and in what is actually being sold.”

Investigating what he calls “capitalist fear mitigation”, Alexander repurposes extra-human sensory experiences of technologies like night vision and thermal imaging, aesthetics that instantly recall the internet’s “military death-cam footage”. Then, he encases them inside the otherwise harmless shop-bought sheet cake, creating an unsettling contradiction – it normalises the quiet but terrific violence of our media’s images capitalism in such an effective fashion they become mundane, part of the furniture of our everyday lives. “Cakes carry their own visual language, and the English language is full of cake metaphors,” says Alexander. “Whatever is placed on a cake becomes a celebration of that subject. Adding an image to a cake creates layers of meaning and acts as a framing device that shapes how the work is perceived and felt.”

Influenced by Wilton and Ateco cake decorating magazines that date back to the 1960s, Alexander has even gone so far as to read Advanced Piping and Modelling, a manual on cake decoration from 1906. Needless to say, the technical construction of these sculptures is as important as the weighty ideas behind them. Designing around the idea of capitalism as a “future-oriented religion, promising security and salvation through consumption”, Alexander uses no better metaphor than the humble cake, which is simultaneously indulgent, sickening, celebratory and kitsch, to criticise the effects of capitalism. You can have your cake, eat it too, but what will happen to you afterwards?