Edie Fake: Entanglement, 2025

  • Edie Fake, Entanglement, 2025

    Entanglement, 2025

    Mounted relief print
    "Entanglement", a woodblock print merges Edie Fake's interest in queer spaces of potential and the aesthetics of ornament with a new subject of chromatic and compositional exploration: the board game.
    $ 2,500.00
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  • A 14-color relief print, Entanglement was created from 8 hand-carved and laser-cut woodblocks, mounted to cloth-wrapped board. The square print takes the form of a colorful board game, with paths like a woven tapestry: its warps and wefts a series of twists, turns, and switchbacks. In a relational sense, the artist has long referenced the textile as a subject in his work, having likened a textile’s weave to one’s  “lifeline through the warp of all other bodies.”  Queer spaces have long been of interest to the artist, however more typically  through the lens of architecture, and more recently, the logic of Tarot cards.

    In 2021, critic Annie Howard pointed out that in Fake’s work, “abstract representations of community form and collapse, cohere and dissipate, reflective of the real experience within queer lives and their ever-shifting constellations.”  The artist here is thinking of what play makes possible: the potential for openness and the acceptance of chance. The game board itself is really a catalyst of sorts, for an ecology of bodies, maybe a party, or a life enmeshed with others. 

    Entanglement’s color palette, the artist describes as fungal or lichenal, is inspired in part by the popular scholarship of Merlin Sheldrake on the extraordinary world and entanglement of fungi.

     





     

     

     

     

     

     



  • A recent painting, Mr. Snakes and Ladders, 2024, also takes the game as its subject, this one with global roots...
    A recent painting, Mr. Snakes and Ladders, 2024, also takes the game as its subject, this one with global roots in India and an eventual western iteration called “Chutes and Ladders.”  Other recent paintings by Fake reference perfume bottles or fabric patterns, and recall metaphysical maps and diagrams made by alchemists, spiritualists, and students of the occult. 

    Edie Fake
    Mr. Snakes and Ladders2024
    Acrylic and gouache on wood panel
    48h x 48w in
    Courtesy of Western Exhibitions, Chicago
  • Edie Fake’s multi-media work — drawings, paintings, installations, comics, books and zines — has been exhibited in solo shows at...

     

    Edie 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.