Benjamin Edwards’s first solo exhibition showcased his adventuresome approaches to portraying the architecture of suburbia, mapping physical and digital territories, and providing fresh views on concepts like “visual overload.” The paintings on view comprise an almost overwhelmingly complex array of signs, symbols, logos, colors, textures, and shapes, all of which are digitally distilled from snapshots of suburban sprawlscapes (Edwards has gathered more than 1000 images on various road trips). The compositions are also digitally worked out to an extent, but the artist creates the final rendition entirely by hand. Convergence, 2000–2001, includes bits and pieces from hundreds of strip malls, fast-food outlets, gas stations, and big-box retailers along the Washington Beltway, that cloud of consumerism girding the national capital. Condensed into an overbearing fantasy, the scene becomes a kind of nightmarish theme park where one might go mad from nonstop, never-ending enjoyment. Convergence can be seen, for Edwards, as a kind of dark apotheosis of the ’90s, an era in which everything from consumer confidence to SUVs swelled and spiraled upward in a widening gyre. Huge as a Pollock, the painting hovers like a brash mirage, the artist’s super-flat style countered by a perspectival, vortexlike effect. And yet it seems fragile, as if the whole thing were held together by a magnetic field.
But perhaps that’s just hindsight. After September 11, the tension between Convergence and Decoherence, 2001, which faced each other from opposite ends of the gallery, seemed eerily premonitory. The latter is a maelstrom of faux-brick facade, windows, and building materials; smiley faces and logos (Target, Starbucks, Chevron, Citgo); even the American flag—a chaos painful to look at, given the disaster site a few miles from the gallery. The vortex effect here is viewed from on high—as if from an airplane and washes of sheer white lend an air of flimsiness and weightlessness, as if to indicate the shoddy construction of all that is exploding outward.
The paintings here occupy a turning point in Edwards’s style and objectives. Where he’d been concerned with building, accreting, condensing (an earlier portrait created an ur-Starbucks based on all the chain’s outlets in Seattle), his newest works subvert and dismantle his earlier techniques. Edge, 2001, is Edwards’s high-concept attempt to portray the “boundaries” of notoriously sprawling Los Angeles, symbolically mapping what the writer James Howard Kunstler termed “the geography of nowhere.” The series of nested images creates another kind of miragelike effect: that of walking across a sea of asphalt toward an endlessly receding shopping mall. Dump (Edge Refuse), 2001, was generated by “recycling” select components obscured by successive layers of Edge; and Fill (Dump Retrieval), 2001, is another vortex, this comprising remnants from Dump. But at this stage the mosaic-like elements are so pulverized that one wonders if this enterprise isn’t just a brainteaser, one that probably makes real sense only to the artist.
More successful is Valulink, 2001, for which a computer program roams the Web (mimicking Edwards on the suburban expressways), plucks images from random corporate websites. and returns to Edwards’s home site to compile them. The outcome is a wall-size vinyl print, an assaultive collage of the Internet as shopping mall/PR billboard. Edwards is moving in several directions at once, with varying degrees of success. He still seems to be test-driving his innovative techniques, taking a road to see where it goes. The results may not be uniformly spectacular yet, but the ideas behind them make him one to watch.
—Julie Caniglia
