Few of my contemporaries seem to have any appreciation of the utter weirdness of growing up in the mid-20th century futurama of upper middle-class American suburbia. The unsettling faux-antiseptic feeling of that era, as people of some means attempted unsuccessfully to laminate the messy organic confusion of their lives with a smooth, Bauhaus-influenced topcoat, was captured most successfully in recent memory by Ang Lee’s film, “The Ice Storm.” It seems sculptor Keith Edmier has been mining similar territory over the past 16 years as well, as evidenced by the fine retrospective of his work being currently mounted at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
In fact, he seems to have nailed it. The funereally titled “Keith Edmier 1991-2007” is a collective masterwork of existential unease, masquerading as memoir. The artist has assembled a series of musings in plastic, bronze, stone and mixed media, more or less chronicling his early youth and coming of age in the barren environment created by his trendy parents in an awful planned subdivision called Bremen Towne Estates near Chicago, which came with its own shopping plaza, movie theater, office complex and a Roman Catholic church. The retrospective is ingeniously framed by a new work commissioned for the show, a full-scale reproduction of the bleak interior of Edmier’s childhood home titled “Bremen Towne.” Scattered within and around the house installation are a number of statues, oversized botanicals and overtly autobiographical pieces, some of them startling and most of them imbued with a portentous form of eroticism.
There’s the 1991 “I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues,” which is essentially an oil portrait of Janis Joplin in 1970, the year she overdosed, posing with then three-year-old Edmier in a tiger costume. The madonna and child theme is repeated elsewhere, most disturbingly in what could be considered the exhibition’s centerpiece, Edmier’s life-sized, Jackie Kennedy-esque pink plastic rendering of his pregnant mother, titled “Beverly Edmier, 1967.” The piece evokes yet another pop cultural reference to the science-infused oddness of the late ’60s and early ’70s, the clear plastic “Visible Woman” kits that showed all the internal parts of the human body. In Edmier’s 1998 sculpture, his curled-up fetus is visible through his mother’s transparent red plastic womb.
Edmier is no less evocative when concocting a reference to early love, represented by the ghostly white “Jill Peters,” another life-sized piece in polyvinyl and a platinum Farrah Fawcett wig, or when constructing an ode to the process of coming to terms with adolescent lust, with “Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000.” This last installation was the result of an interlude working with the actual Ms. Fawcett, who before becoming every preteen boy’s pinup icon in the 1970s was a budding sculpture student at the University of Texas in Austin. The cheeky Edmier in 1998 got in touch with Fawcett, and induced her to collaborate with him — in 2000 they sat for and made nude portraits of each other that stand as perhaps the ultimate example of adolescent fantasy realized, for better or worse. The main element of the multi-piece work consists of two sculptures — a life-sized Michelangelo-like white marble, gold and diamond rendering of a nude Ms. Fawcett and a large, laconic-looking bronze self-portrait nude. One is led to suspect, based on the accompanying artwork including a breathlessly creepy photograph of Fawcett and Edmier together, either that the artistic union may have resulted in Edmier realizing his fantasy, or that at least his interest in his subject is not purely artistic.
The “Bremen Towne” house is as eerily arresting in person as it seems in print, a funhouse of garishly patterned bronze aluminum wallpaper, kitschy fixtures and approximations of modern art prints by Picasso, Dali and others. There’s an ominous hallway to nowhere, lined with far too many locked doors. The effect is like wandering around an Outer Limits set, waiting for a gelatinous alien slug creature to skitter across your foot.
Anyway, whatever you do, if you’re a reasonably privileged child of the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s whose mom checked her emotions at the door and whose dad maintained a closet full of identical-looking dark suits, try not to miss this show. You’re bound to get that old, familiar feeling, and may even catch yourself measuring your own life’s progress in distancing you from all that “Keith Edmier 1991-2007” represents.