Keith Edmier

KEITH EDMIER opens his first one-person exhibition at Metro Pictures on February 7th with three sculptures based on reconstructed memories and associations inspired by childhood interests and fixations. Each piece is a hybridization of natural and man-made objects, altered to elicit child-like fascination with primordial desires and natural wonders.

Edmier punctures the gallery's facade with a large plate-glass window to which translucent polyurethane snowflakes cast from natural specimens are affixed. When natural light hits the window, the interior space is flooded with a spiral of prismatic reflection. In Victoria Regia (First Night's Bloom) and Victoria Regia (Second Night's Bloom) (1998), Edmier simulates an underwater view of two giant water lilies cast in a monochrome flesh-colored rubber and plastics that sprout upward from the floor reaching a height of nine feet. The stems support enormous lily pads and bulbous flowers with delicate individually cast petals. Jill Peters (1997) is a solitary adolescent female figure cast in white wax and polyvinyl, standing on a mound of snow. Dressed in white and supporting a buoyant Farrah Fawcett hairstyle made of natural blonde hairs, she is the incarnation of Edmier's adolescent infatuation with a fellow student from elementary school. Modeled upon a class photograph and Edmier's memory, she personifies awkward sexual innocence and arouses intangible desires and obsessions experienced at that age.

Edmier has had one-person exhibitions at the University of South Florida Art Museum (1997); Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam (1997); the Neuger Riemschneider, Berlin (1995); and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (1995). His work was included in group shows such as "Gothic" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, and Site Santa Fe (1997), and "Human/Nature" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1995).

The exhibition, organized in cooperation with Friedrich Petzel Gallery, continues through March 7.

For additional information please refer to the following:

Matthew Debord, "The Evil That Men Do," Frieze, March/April, 1997, pp. 58-59
Neville Wakefield, "Keith Edmier," Artforum, December, 1995, p. 89