Canned Bluey! Standing next to an Indianapolis “N-D-Y” photo-op setup.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…
Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: the annual Canstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “We Bought an Aldi”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.
Canned Starry Night! Not the first homage we’ve seen here in Indy.
Canned Bob Ross! Apropos of his old TV studio in Muncie.
A canned three-scoop sundae!
Canned cardinal and real peonies! Our state bird and flower.
Canned elephant! Which sounds like a Chopped ingredient.
Canned Tree of Hope! A symbol of the never-ending efforts to end hunger.
Elsewhere around the fairgrounds, food appeared in display cases in a variety of forms, some more edible than others.
Living S’mores, likely a sculpture and not just S’mores with faces penciled on the marshmallows.
Jigsaw puzzle cookies were the big winners in a 4-H baking contest.
The grand prize winner in the cake division, apropos of the fair’s art theme.
This is not a faux cake made of needlework; this is faux needlework made of cake.
Taylor Swift cake, side 1.
Same Taylor Swift cake, side 2.
Some entrants in the 4-H Ugly Cake Contest, including a pie, which we overlooked at first but had an explanatory card.
Same contest, same vitrine, bottom row.
Last but most, we present our work-in-progress shot of the annual cheese sculpture as of August 8th. And hey, Sarah Kaufmann the Cheese Lady is back! After taking last year off, she returned to the AgHort Building to carve another hefty load of cheese bricks into not just art, but in this case Art, apropos of the Newfields sponsorship. Her work is expected to continue throughout the fair’s final week.
For the hardcore fans of the Mona Lisa, American Gothic, and/or dairy products.
To be continued! Other chapters in this very special miniseries:
Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour
Part 2: Let’s Pretend We’re Influencers
Part 3: Where the Art Museum Meets the Chainsaw
Part 4: Land of the Glowing Giants
Part 6: The Year in Lego
Part 7: The Year in Antiques
Part 8: The Year in Art
Part 9: The Rest of Our Day
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