I welcome your feedback. Please send questions or comments to:

Indicates the work is available. Please contact either me or Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York.

In lieu of a current statement, which I can never seem to get right, I'll share some recent books from my shelf:

"The Collapse of Complex Societies", by Joseph Tainter

"The Nature of Technology", by W. Brian Arthur

"The Singularity is Near", by Ray Kurzweil

"You Are Not a Gadget", by Jaron Lanier

"Collapse", by Jared Diamond

Statement for We: (view exhibition)

In the development of Republic I’ve always envisioned four distinct aspects of the city: the dynamic materialism and lunacy of unfettered economic growth (Automatic City); the hopes, dreams and ideologies which provide precedent and background to the utopian impulse (Dream City); the characters, players and actors caught up in the confusion of this real/virtual tableau (Bots); and the micro-mechanisms and behaviors which serve to unfold a wider effect (System). These aspects are like pillars for a future synthesis, and they provide the foundation necessary to introduce a longer narrative arc.

With the exhibition in New York last fall, the first three of these categories have been implemented, at various stages of sophistication. The fourth aspect, System, has always been the most elusive and will remain a puzzle for some time. The title We, of course, comes from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian novel, which is the first of its genre. But I also had in mind the pronoun “we”, referring to the introduction of characters into the paintings, as well as to a first attempt at a portrait of who we are in contemporary society. In retrospect, I underestimated the power of the literary reference, and the paintings were probably read too closely through the lens of that narrative. Pointing so clearly to such a well known story (or genre, since several other works, from 1984 to Brave New World to Brazil are practically interchangeable here) had the effect of drowning out any other possible narratives sprouting like vulnerable seedlings out of the paintings. Blankness would have been better.

The questions remain, who are these characters and what are they doing? Are they people or video game characters? I don’t know. I’ve often thought they could be the character equivalents of spam names, or the avatars for pieces of automated software, hence the name “bots”. My original intention was to make models of people from various advertisements (see the Civitas archive) and then mix them up. A short time into the project I began to collect body parts extracted from games like the Sims, World of Warcraft, America’s Army and Grand Theft Auto. The strangeness of this mixture was an intriguing shock. I was so fascinated by my first Frankenstein creation that I had no choice but to paint him (see Cinnamon Gardens). This method of collecting, modeling and re-building is a sociological science experiment, and I don’t know what sorts of characters will emerge. A “bot” is really a bundle of hyper-real images, made up of ads that we project ourselves and others into, customized avatars, self-portrait Sims and the various guises of role-playing games, from the young black youth of San Andreas to the soldiers of America’s Army. This doesn’t tell us about who we are as much as how we see ourselves, and, ultimately, who we want to be. Which is more real?

In any case, I always felt that this introduction of figures into the paintings would be a difficult leap, and perhaps an awkward one. Now that this chapter is done, I expect the science experiment to continue, but not necessarily to occupy center stage. Bots now inhabit the city along with the flux of manic architecture and the stains of our collective junkspace. They’re thinking about Utopia, but what they’re doing remains to be seen.

Benjamin Edwards

March 20, 2007

Statement for Automatic City: (view exhibition)

Automatic City is the first phase of a larger, ongoing project that I call Republic. While the works now on view in this exhibition begin to articulate the early formation of a generic city, there is much to this virtual place still to be explored.  The empty squares around the central image on the main directory page (as well as on the Automatic City directory) are like zoned plots waiting to be filled in some ideal city: I have a general idea of what will grow there, but the specifics have yet to be built. In the coming months and years, these empty spaces will turn into more archives and more projects that will eventually feed into the center, into the paintings that will make Republic come alive.

Often I have been asked about the relationship between my paintings and this website. To me, they are two sides of a coin, and one is incomplete without the other. Hopefully one can walk into the white cube and look at one of my paintings and have a pleasurable aesthetic experience. And hopefully the information in this site provides interesting conceptual background to the paintings. But the best way to see my work is to experience it in both of these formats. As an art viewer, I've always been troubled by long texts and documentation intruding into the gallery. And as a painter, it's important that what I make can stand on its own without relying on background information. However, my work is not just visually complex: there is a conceptual layering process that occurs in tandem with the physical layering in the paintings. This site is my attempt to reveal some of those layers, outside of the normal art-world context.

Benjamin Edwards

November 27, 2004

Previous statements on this page:

The site has recently undergone some design changes, as well as some updates in content. The most extensive update has been in the Autopia section of the site, accessed through the main directory, and it will be continually updated from now until the show in November. A new feature of the site is the Studio section, which will document the progress of the paintings as they develop in the studio. A new painting begins today so the picture shows only the sky and ground. Every morning I hope to update the image with the work completed the previous day.

The Projects and Archives sections will most likely remain under construction until after the show in November. The Works section has been updated with paintings from late 2003, and will remain as is for awhile.

Below is the Welcome Statement from last October. Some of the details have changed, but the overall concepts are the same.

Benjamin Edwards March 1, 2004

Welcome Statement from October, 2003:

For a long time I've wanted to create a website that would be a work of art in itself and a visual manifestation of my conceptual process rather than simply a promotional showcase for the paintings I make in the studio. I've found that the architecture of the web is well suited to the necessities of the interconnected archives which form the foundation of my work.

The acts of collecting and processing experienced material are at the base of my project, a base which supports the finely distilled, most visible and most consumable end-product: the paintings. My process can sometimes seem as sprawling and overwhelming as my subject matter, both for me and, I suspect, for the viewers of my paintings as well. This site is intended to bring light and clarity to that process, as well as to construct a virtual place for information to reside, if only to lurk in the background.

My first attempt at this virtual place was www.retopia.com, which was online from 1999-2001. "Retopia" is a neologism from "re-" for repetition or representation and "topos" which is Greek for place; this term is also meant to signify a representation of Utopia. This original archive contains over 1000 places of standardized consumption, collected from Washington DC, New Jersey, Long Island, San Jose, Los Angeles and India. Over time, the information in these pages will link to pages in the Projects archive, which will in turn link to the Works archive, so that the conceptual histories of the paintings will become more clear.

In addition to the Works section of this site which contains most major paintings, drawings and prints over the last 13 years, and the Projects section which illustrates more conceptual activities that have informed the paintings but have never had much of a chance to be seen, there will be a series of archives that form a sort of spectrum of my working process. These are represented by the thumbnails at the bottom of the home page.

These archives will appear gradually over the course of time, beginning with the left side, then the right.  Eventually I  hope to end up in the middle, with Republic.

As more material gets posted to the site, look to this page for a brief introduction and description. I appreciate feedback about the work: if you have questions or comments, please send me an email.

RETOPIA

Repetition, reaction, recycle, representation...Retopia is my depository for material collected through the course of everyday life, as well as through day-long excursions, usually to a specific geographic location. There is a collection trigger mechanism in my mind, an unconscious double-take on a building, a sign, a name. It's not a rational process but an aesthetic one, and I long ago learned to trust this sense rather than to try to dissect it. I suspect it's the mirror image of the aesthetic judgment that happens in the studio. I yield to this visceral tug as much as possible with as little editing as possible, which means that I collect much more material than I can ever possibly work with in my lifetime.  The consumer's experience is that of a constant bombardment to which we've somehow grown accustomed, probably through the natural defense of numbness. Retopia is my antidote, my compulsion to notice. To do all of this for its own sake would either be some futile counter-capitalist strategy, or insanity. I collect this material, however, for the purpose of making paintings, which doesn't have the same stigma.

MATERIAL ARCHIVE

In 1996 and 1997 I began making paintings and drawings which distilled visual information down to its essence, a reduction to the simplest form which would still retain identity. This act of reduction allowed for a greater management of simple parts within highly complex arrangements, and it also allowed for the viewer to project his or her own consumer-cultural language into an essentially abstract composition. Basically, this process removed much of the details of content and left it to the viewer to put it back in. The Material Archive is simply an additional layer of extraction, or a refinement and emphasis of something already there. Mostly, however, it represents a preparation of the material to make it workable digitally, which makes it workable for painting. Unlike Retopia, where the entries are in chronological order, the elements in the Material Archive are presented in the order in which I processed them. The first number indicates the chronology of this archive, the Roman numeral indicates the volume of Retopia, and the final number identifies the chronology of the Retopia archive to which it refers. There are links from Retopia to the Material Archive and vice versa for reference.

AUTOPIA

Autopia, or Automatic City, is a virtual environment designed to give spatial extension to the elements from the Material Archive. The plan is determined by a computer simulation which mixes randomness with a series of rules for development, as well as inputs from economic data such as retail sales and new housing starts, so that the "city" organizes itself organically over time. A history of this growth can be viewed by clicking on "History" at the bottom of the Autopia Directory page, which is in the form of an aerial view of the environment. Clicking on an area of the directory/map will zoom in on that section for greater detail. Clicking on one of the developed tiles will link to a viewing page for that zone. Back at the main directory/map page, clicking on "Roaming" at the bottom of the page will take you to views of my drifts through the environment. The images on these viewing pages are used as raw material to compose paintings.  Autopia is a starting point for the creation of a virtual city, but it is to be one layer of many that will eventually combine to form a richer and more complex environment. Autopia is an attempt at creating a real place, but if it represents any place it is my own memory and consumer psychogeography, as if consciousness were mirrored by a mini-simulacrum within the interior of the mind. I believe it will only be through the act of painting these images that a convincing sense of place can emerge. The Automatic City is a machine for making paintings. It is a place partly of my own making, but in many ways a completely unexpected place which presents vistas that I could never compose.

Benjamin Edwards

October 9, 2003