23 June 2008

Benjamin Edwards

Benjamin Edwards (Courtesy of the artist)

(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Art on the Edge: 17 Contemporary American Artists.)

The Pusan Experience, 2002. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. (Credit: Courtesy of Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY)

"The initial concept and general visualization for an image always begin for me out of everyday experiences as a consumer, from the subconscious repetition of elements of the mass-cultural landscape which unavoidably, and relentlessly, fall into my perception like droplets into an ocean. Mixed with aesthetic antennae willfully combing through this junkstream, and a tempered absorption of history and the patterns of past utopias, my hope is that a synthesis greater than the sum emerges, a nostalgically transcendental phenomenon. This new manifestation of previously unrelated and disorganized facts is an attempt to express something about the places we inhabit, the ones we have lost, the places we hoped to make, and the ones we hope to never see."

[Benjamin Edwards (b. 1970, Iowa City, Iowa) attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (MFA 1997); the San Francisco Art Institute's graduate painting program (1992); and the University of California, Los Angeles (BA, 1991). His first two solo exhibitions were at the Artemis Greenburg Van Doren Gallery, New York City (2004, 2001). He participated in the Prague Biennale, in the Czech Republic (2003); and his work has been in numerous group exhibitions in venues such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2003); Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; Gallerie Faurschou, Copenhagen, Denmark; and P.S.#I/MoMA Center for Contemporary Art, Long Island City, New York. Edwards lives and works in Washington, D.C.]