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ArchiveBorn 1961 in Tokyo, Japan
Machiko Edmondson refers to her practice as a representation of painting rather than as being representational. Despite the overt use of faces as her image source, she regards her work as neither figurative paintings nor as portraits of people. Employing the momentary seduction of fashion photography to lure the viewer into the world of idealized beauty, her paintings mimic the styles and codes of the “desire” industry to question the value and obsessions of unattainable perfection.
Just as in fashion photography where the nodes of representation support a product, these same images are appropriated by Edmondson to support and contextualize the very nature of painting. Although seductive, the ideal they present becomes hyper-real. The image is devoid of identity, and once the empty façade is ‘consumed,’ the viewing experience gives way to the anxiety and obsession of the painter’s approach to the act of painting itself.
As the viewer engages with these works and scans the surface, shifting their reading between fantasy and the tropes of modernist painting, the skin of the image and the skin of the painted surface, these works become both paintings of metaphors and of unattainable desire.
 Machiko Edmondson, White Chalk, 2008, Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches |
