Benjamin Edwards at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren - New York.Brief Article

Strip malls and fast-food franchises are among the great unifying elements of the contemporary American landscape. Regional specificity may be indicated by the facade material--red brick or stucco or some fiberglass approximation of the same--but signage keeps us, the target market, feeling right at home wherever we find ourselves. For several years, Benjamin Edwards has digitally photographed these retail outlets from the discreet distance of their ample parking lots. His first one-person exhibition in New York included paintings and prints constituted from details of those photos. In these new images, everything is familiar, but nothing is recognizable.

For the 8-by-12-foot painting Convergence (2000-01), Edwards assembled a huge pile of emporia from photographed components. The gargantuan structure rises in the distance like an alien city on the cover of a science-fiction paperback, impossibly complex and defying architectural logic. Edwards paints with acrylic and incorporates the texturing mediums used in architectural models to provide the feel of brick, stone and landscape elements. Bright and hard, Convergence is both a retailer's utopian vision and, to the critic of consumer culture, a dystopian nightmare. Edwards's vision is celebratory and appalling in equal measure.

Edwards knows that to be effective, he must be as dazzling as the culture he infiltrates. Valuelink (2001) is a mural-sized ink-jet print that inserts overlays of thousands of Web-site graphics into a grid, each section of which is about the size of an average computer monitor. Compared to the unspecific familiarity of Convergence, every element in Valuelink is recognizable, each promotional message is urgent and clear. This frantic encouragement to shop creates what Edwards calls "an insincere superwelcome." Spend time with the piece, and the illusion of choice and variety fades.

In an Iris print titled Proposal for a Megastructure (2001), Edwards seems to have drained the color from Convergence. The same fantastic edifice is there, but it has become transparent, ethereal, and it's rendered in the nauseating neutral tones of prints that hang in hotel rooms around the world. Colors are again muted, and transparency suggests shards of glass in Decoherence (2001), a painting whose dimensions equal those of Convergence. Here, a structure has blown apart like an object released into a vacuum. A few commercial logos, a smiley face and an American flag are visible in the debris. Recent terrorist events have placed Edwards among the artists whose works have acquired a new significance. But his conceptual clearheadedness and technical ability would seem to equip him to deal intelligently with the times.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group