Gallery One, Chicago
Western Exhibition is thrilled to present ten elaborate and intense gouache-and-ink drawings in Edie Fake’s first solo show since moving to Los Angeles in 2014.
Edie Fake’s work grapples with the manifestation and meaning of queer space. His drawings use architectural elements as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans* identities. These structures come together to map what Fake considers to be a liminal landscape of self-definition. The imagery depicted (stages, parade floats, art deco buildings) combines and conflates parts of Fake’s family history with aspects of queer history, reaching towards a personal, psychic geography of transpeople in society. He states: “It’s a lot of serious stuff, but also not without an ecstatic aspect, even to its more sinister or confounding moments.”
“Just A Stage” dramatically pairs its title, the dismissal of agency and legitimacy, with an elaborate, shape-shifting theater- a space drawn around temporal, transitional and transitory states of being. Similarly, the drawings “Sugar In The Tank” and “The Friends Of Dorothy” turn obscure queer euphemisms into unruly parade floats which contort and confuse visual and linguistic perspectives. “The Blood Bank” is a site of family conflict and sadness that simultaneously references the civic panic that shuttered bath houses at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. “Gender Changer”, a drawing of an imposing black-and-gold building, is constructed around two shafts of windows in multicolored window frames. The two columns of windows, supported by an blocky, unmovable edifice tease out the limitations of a male-female binary. Similarly, “The Fitting Room” depicts a structure of mirrors that folds back into itself, rooted in the intangibility of identity.
Fake’s drawings from 2010 to 2013, recently collected in Memory Palaces, a monograph by Secret Acres, depicted building facades that reimagined queer and feminist spaces from Chicago’s past. On Bad At Sports in January 2013, curator Danny Orendorff wrote about this body of work: “…the collection of building facades Fake depicts – described as a neighborhood – can only be psychically located between utopian fantasy and interpretive research. Doing so foregrounds how the imagination and it’s shadow, desire, propels individual or collective searches for heritage, lineage, and belonging…Comprehension of these disappeared, criminalized spaces and services entails not simply an intellectual recognition, but something much more sensorial and perhaps even spiritual when translated through the prismatic hallucinations offered by Fake.”
Edie Fake’s recent solo show at Western Exhibitions in Chicago was reviewed in artforum.com, Artnet, and New American Paintings. His drawings, comics books and publications have also been written about it in The Chicago Reader, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including group shows at MASS Gallery in Austin, John Connelly Presents in NYC, the Nikolaj museum in Copenhagen, LACE in Los Angeles, and threewalls in Chicago. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and recently dropped out of the MFA program at the University of Southern California. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.