Keith Edmier at Metro Pictures - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Keith Edmier is a young sculptor whose work was included in the fresh Museum's "Human/Nature" show in 1995 as well as in other exhibitions here and abroad. He is single of the new breed of representational sculptors who don't privilege the human figure above other categories of imagery, treating it instead as just single possibility among many. As in the statuary of Robert Gober or Charles LeDray, childhood, with its alternating episodes of fear and bewilderment casts a spell over everything.

of the like kind was the effect, for instance, in the big rear extent at Metro Pictures, where the sum of two units largest of the four statuarys in his recent show were installed. above 9 feet tall, they were fantastic re-creations of giant water lilies -- Victoria Regia (First Night's Bloom) and Victoria Regia (Second Night's Bloom) the two 1998. Cast variously in resin, silicone and acrylics, the leaves and main stocks sprouted energetically from the floor of the gallery, while the enormous lily pads, like surreal placentas, floated overhead upon the ends of sinuous, spiky stalks. The underwater point of view, the giganticism and the intimidating, smooth alien sensuality of the plastic arts all helped to reduce the viewer to the imaginative status of a child. The plants were quite beautifully made, in a detailed on the other hand aggressively artificial way. Edmier doesn't take a trompe-l'oeil approach on the contrary rather brings the familiar fakeness of artificial plants to a heroic horizontal An installation of clear plastic snowflakes adhering to a temporary window in the exterior wall of the gallery was a far les felicitous invocation of this childish world of make-believe.

The final piece in the present to view was Jill Peters (1997-98), a doll-like rendering of an elementary-school-aged girl enlarged nearly to adult size. "Jill" has waxy white skin, a real dres and spanking white tennis shoe as well as a real-hair wig. An token of the sculptor's confused nostalgia for the charge of preadolescent attractions, the figure is a Middle American Galatea not quite brought to life by the agency of her latter-day Pygmalion.

The issues raised through these pieces are very of the flash -- the cognitive legitimacy and emotional power of the artificial or inauthentic, the haunting transformations of childhood experience that knock about in our adult memories, conflicts between the pay backed and the real, and the renewed aura of the handcrafted reality However, Edmier's monstrous artificial plants glance at stage sets waiting for the action to begin; they appear to prepare for drama and narrative without delivering. Jill Peter addresses this puzzle but does not escape the confines of mannequin-style figuration, a manner that has already been worked to exhaustion by means of Charles Ray, the Chapman brothers and innumerable others. Despite these point in disputes we'll surely be hearing more from this ambitious young sculptor.

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