Benjamin Edwards

Depicting a world that believes it is a Utopia

You show almost all your process in your website.

Yeah. I haven’t updated it recently though.

Many artists do not like to show the work in progress.

I think with my work it’s such a big part of it. I try to show what’s going on.

It looks like there are layers of walls in the same block but not forming concrete one building.

The reason that it looks like that is because I take different images… The first of all the architecture that I make is very disjointed and it doesn’t form a whole. So it’s already chopped up and fragmented and I take usually three different images and I will take parts of those images and weave them together. So the effect is that the building is trying to form something but does not ever quite form anything coherent. The idea is that the whole city is in an undefined state. If you are familiar with quantum mechanics at all, the idea is that everything is kind of all over the place at once and it doesn’t really cohere until you observe it. It is kind of a complicated idea. The idea is that atoms just don’t ever really coalesce into to something solid. Things are just all over the place.
That’s the sort of the aesthetic that I’m trying to get. Things that are just constantly moving and you are just seeing it in a frozen frame for just a very split second and in a split second later it moves in a different way. It’s never going to stay still.

Moving to gallery 2.

What do you mean by “Ether Studies”?

This material is… I call it junk, this clatter of stuff. In studio, I call it ether and I distinguish between architecture and ether. The sort of dictionary definition of ether that I am using would be like things that are just in the air, that are just out there; almost like cell phone conversation is floating by the air right now but you cannot really see it. Trying to make things visible. Anything informational that is going around, you cannot see, but it is there. All of the stuff is collected from just different sources of my own experience. Whether it’s a logo from advertisement which I found walking down the street, something from the web, the text is from different sources like video games and spam, just different things.

We could imagine because the Japanese text is popular for computer geeks.

Yes. I think the text in English is the same thing. There is a lot of chat, nonsense. I also have images from tv or youtube. This is Stephen Colbert["Ether Study (Jane)", 2007] at the White House correspondent’s dinner, that’s Don Imus. That’s Britney Spears["Ether Study(No money required just one click)", 2008] with shaved head, this is Bush["Ether Study (ElumXeres What)", 2007], that is Scarlet Johansson["Ether Study (yes yes, Beloved dark rose)", 2007], just shattered, that’s Anna Nicole Smith["Ether Study (Order of Erebus)", 2007], and these figures are from video games like Grand Theft Auto, Second Life and the Sims. The text comes from World of Warcraft, the video game. Usually it’s people’s names.
These are junk information surrounding us in the air.

The words are really chaotic I think, but the point of view is classic.

It’s basically just looking down on the street so the camera is fixed. These are made as studies, that is why these are called “Ether Studies” for paintings, but I actually have not yet made the finished paintings. When I make a painting, there is a whole architectural scene here, and I take bits and pieces from these to make paintings. So when I paint I would like to have lots of different options, when I am looking for particular shapes and colors I can have lots of things to choose from.

How is the impression of Tokyo?

I only had a couple hours, but I just went down to Kiddy Land and went down that street (Omotesando). It’s just over whelming I didn’t realize it was going to be so crowded. I don’t know I can’t really answer that question. At first I thought it wasn’t quite as much as I was expecting but after talking to people and realizing that the city is spread out there is no one place to see what Tokyo is really like, but you have to go to different places, then it makes more sense to me. Hopefully I will come back.

Do you enjoy traveling?

I do.

What kind of environment did you grow up?

I am from the Bay Area in California near San Francisco, it’s a lot of sprawl like Tokyo, spread out, and there is not really a central place. So that really affected me a lot as I was growing up. Just this idea that place that doesn’t really have a center, just constantly getting developed.

Would you like to live in the world you created by yourself?

Would I like to live in the world of my paintings? No. I don’t think of it as a Utopia, I think of it as depicting a world that believes it is a Utopia. It’s also about global homogenization, the fact that all places seem to come together and be similar. Where I was just couple hours ago, there is a Gap. A few years ago I was in Amsterdam and it’s like the same exact stores. Obviously there are lots of differences too, but it seems like anywhere you go anywhere now, all the shopping is the same, everything is same, that is kind of what the work is about too, all the places combined into the mixture.