Benjamin Edwards reconfigures the familiar landscape of strip malls, gas stations, and super stores, into composites that assume the theatricality and beauty of classical architecture. In his monumental works, Edwards collapses multiple levels of time and space into deliriously animated portraits of cities around the world. His paintings are composites of numerous digital photographs, which Edwards programs into a computer, simplifies and color-codes. He then superimposes the images upon one another and deletes and reorders details.
This process creates a template for the painting, which is then constructed over hundreds of hours using acrylics and textured materials. The artist feels that “both the American landscape and the American mind face the escalating challenge of congestion in the face of technological and economic development.” Edwards, who has been referred to as “Mondrian in hyperspace” tames this confusing congestion by simplifying and stylizing complex information and channeling it into a classically composed image with a single vanishing point.
Benjamin Edwards was born in 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa and lives and works in Washington D.C. His first solo exhibition, Convergence, took place in 2001 at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. Edwards holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
http://www.clevelandart.org/exhibcef/metascape/html/4641499.html
Website
http://www.benjaminedwards.net
