Edie Fake
American, 1980 -

Suasion, 2024
Acrylic and gouache on wood panel

Loan courtesy of the Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and the artist



Edie Fake at home with dog, Twentynine Palms, CA. Interview and Portrait by Joey Garfield

Question: I would think growing up knowing you are queer and finally getting to become the truth of who you are, would feel not new. Or is that naive?

Answer: “There is something that does feel like a relief. But that’s not even the right word. It’s a wild social shift that’s happening in my life. Passing as this, not that. Also being honest about trans identity has always been core to me and my work, and I feel that passing more as a man is not that simple. There is a relief to being seen in that way, but the biggest relief is being seen and feeling safe as a trans man. That feels the most honest.” - Edie Fake

https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/edie-fake-off-the-grid/


COMMENTS

Plotted out beforehand using graphite pencil, rulers and protractors, and hand-painted with the illusion of hard-edged precision, Edie Fake’s compositions are reliant on the logic of Tarot card design and draw inspiration from the spiritual diagrams of Emma Kunz. Featuring a newfound focus on fabric patterns and perfume bottles, his current body of work is also dotted with flower blossoms, sometimes still attached to daisy-chained or trellised stems. Similar to Fake’s guided meditation drawing instructions published in the New York Times during quarantine, the bold, graphic line work and luminous color gradation of these new works conjure up an Ernst Haeckel botanical illustration set in stained glass.

Since moving from first Chicago, then to Los Angeles while briefly attending grad school at USC, to now the high desert of Joshua Tree in California, Fake’s work has evolved from his acclaimed Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — to a new feeling of vulnerability due to shifts in the U.S. social and political climate. The work blurs lines between architecture and body with structures adorned by elements that seem to be both decorative and protective. Architectural components are used as visual metaphors for the ways in which definition and validation elude trans identities. Says Fake, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.”

https://westernexhibitions.com/artist/edie-fake/

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Fake makes paintings full of extraordinary colors and exquisite detail that contain simplified forms. Two points of reference are tarot cards and the Swiss mystic Emma Kunz. Here, the center might be a color wheel or a ferris wheel (or both), while flowers and leaves may read as embroidery. Small drops of water flow down an unseen gradient, the wheels rotate, the vines stretch—as if everything were changing while staying the same. In a recent email, the artist shared that his work tries to grapple with paradoxes and visualizing ‘impossible’ or ‘contradictory’ structures and states of being, much of which comes from trans experience in a culture shaped by binary assumptions.

Born in Evanston, IL, Fake studied at Rhode Island School of Design and now resides in the high desert at Twentynine Palms.

- Friends and Lovers, 2024