Edie Fake

EDIE FAKE’s vantage point on climate catastrophe comes from living in the Mojave Desert, an environment imminently threatened by extractive exhaustion and biological collapse. Fake takes as his subject the harsh and absurd realities of a rapidly shifting place as well as the possibility of adapting to severely stacked odds. His intricate collages are inspired by his sandy surroundings in the high desert and continue to explore themes of queer community which have been at the core of his work for years. The collages recall illustrations from natural history catalogues and science textbooks and offer a representational foil to Fake’s better-known abstract work, meticulously rendered gouache-onpanel paintings that distill investigations into architecture, alchemy, water scarcity, and ecological grief. Informed by

looking at diatom art, desert sand, cellular and viral behavior, rising ocean levels, and as always with Edie Fake, the audacity of queer utopian imagining, his artistic practice mines the grammar of architecture to carve out space for bodies that have been othered and invalidated by dominant systems of knowledge. Fake’s abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their evershifting constellations.

Fake’s multi-media work — drawings, paintings, installations, comics, books and zines — has been exhibited in solo shows at Berkeley Art Museum, California; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; in New York City at The Drawing Center, Broadway Gallery and Marlborough Gallery and in group shows at the Museum of Art and Design, NY; Institute of Art, Virginia. His 2018 show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in Art in America. Fake’s work is held in the collections of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; RISD Museum, Providence; KADIST, San Francisco; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his Gaylord Phoenix collection of comics won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Fake’s work has been written about and featured in Artforum, New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Art News, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, The Comics Journal, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Edie Fake received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York and he currently lives and works in Twentynine Palms, California.

Bio courtesy of Western Exhibitions, Chicago.