Machiko Edmonson
Your Guilty Prize
Your Guilty Prize
Title: Your Guilty Prize
Date: 2013
Medium: Oil on aluminum
Artist: Machiko Edmonson
Exhibition: Outside of Outside, 2013
From artist:
M. Edmondson refers to her practice as 'representation of painting’ rather than being representational.
Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings nor portraits. Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewers into the world of idealised beauty and yearning, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the desire industry to question the value and obsessions of aspirational perfection.
Just as in fashion photography, where the model is a support for the product and contextualises it, such images also support and contextualise Edmondson’s paintings. Although seductive, the ideal they present becomes hyper-real: the image is devoid of identity and a paradoxically empty facade, which is quickly consumed, giving way to the anxiety and obsession that assert these paintings as paintings. Beyond the image that gives them their presence, what is being portrayed here is the question of the aspirational perfection of painting itself. As the viewer engages with these works and scans the surface, shifting their reading between fantasy and the tropes of modernist abstract painting, the skin of the image and the skin of the painted surface, these works become paintings of unattainable desire.
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