Publications

Edie Fake, Interior Decorator, 2015

Edie Fake, Interior Decorator, 2015

Edie Fake’s super-structures

Based in the Southern California desert city of Twentynine Palms, Edie Fake makes colorful drawings that explore themes of gender, sexuality, and identity. From a distance and often in reproductions, Fake’s drawings appear mechanical or digital, but up-close and in-person that illusion falls away as the subtle evidences of the handmade appear more clearly. These meticulously rendered gouache and ink architectural drawings focus on façade and ornamentation as a way to understand our bodies, ourselves, and emphasize the importance of thinking deeply and critically about the communities we live in and the spaces we inhabit.

Fake’s powerful ability to use drawing as a way to coalesce conversations about architecture, language, gender, and space. The drawings create a different entry point for discussion, and provide a path circumventing the rules and routines of language that limit and constrain the ways we think, converse, and experience the body. Woven through the work is an ongoing interrogation of trans identity, gender transition, community, and an ongoing questioning of what gets lost when living in a world where people don’t feel comfortable sharing who they are.

With a skillful handling of perspective, Fake transforms two-dimensional space into a dazzlingly sophisticated rendering of layers and depth, recalling the aesthetics and visual hierarchies of early 1980s arcade games and vector display technology. Fake draws upon a wide range of influences, including the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s (Christina Romberg, Ray Yoshida, and Roger Brown), fabric pattern design, and Outsider Art. Visionary environments like Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain in the Southern Californian desert or Thomas Kong's Kim's Corner Food in Chicago also influence Fake’s densely coded works that address queer architecture and buildings which create free space for LGBTQ communities whose histories, like many other marginalized groups, are interrupted, partial, and fractured.

Fake’s drawings highlight the ways ethics and institutional values become intertwined with physical structures. Ivory Tower was created in response to Fake's entire MFA class dropping out of the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art in protest of altered financial aid offers and a firing of long-time valued faculty.

The highly patterned building facades emphasize the transitory and amorphous qualities of architectural structures, which we so often perceive as unchanging and nearly immortal cultural bedrocks. Last Man Standing and Before Stonewall reference incomplete and fractured histories through architectural fragments and negative space to capture decaying buildings in the process of regeneration.

By incorporating text in works like Personal Business or Friendship and Freedom as well as through deliberate, multi-layered, and often humorous title selections such as The Stick It Inn, Fake’s drawings are visual riddles that rely heavily upon language to create meaning and make connections between body and building. Clearly and cryptically, these puns, inside jokes, and double entendres make reference to orifices, cavities, and secret spaces. Egg Palace, titled after a diner in Chicago, addresses issues of female reproductive organs, fallopian tubes, pregnancy, and the interesting ways our lives intersect. Union Station and No Means capture the structures fundamental to the interconnectedness of humans and the resourcefulness required to build a community from nothing and with minimal means.

Fake depicts historically important places that are often associated with potent personal narratives, transforming these past sites of struggle into super-structures that exist as radical gestures encouraging a forward-looking reconsideration of how we construct the worlds in which we live. This powerful act of reimagining has the potential of unleashing a more open and ambitious vision for the structures and spaces we have yet to create. —DJ Hellerman

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Introduction and post-screening q&a for Frank Gillette’s Riverrun, 2017-2018 at Künstlerhaus Graz

Interview with Cassils, King Kong Garçon, Performance Issue

Interview with Cassils, King Kong Garçon, Performance Issue

Bill McDowell: Ground

Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration

Bill McDowell, published by Daylight Books with an essay by Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, contributions from Rosanne Cash and Wendell Berry, and an interview conducted by DJ Hellerman, Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Burlington City Arts.

In Ground, Bill McDowell has assembled a series of "killed" negatives from the FSA archives, many of which have never before been published. These include several photographs from 1936 that Walker Evans had made for Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, the book he published with James Agee. Also included are never before published photographs by Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Paul Carter, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein.


This image comes from John Killacky's short film, titled, 'Flow,' on which he collaborated with filmmaker Art Bell.

This image comes from John Killacky's short film, titled, 'Flow,' on which he collaborated with filmmaker Art Bell.

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Panel on grief, healing, and creative practice organized in conjunction with Not A Metric Matters at Syracuse University.