“I feel so vulnerable about this work,” Fake admits about his recent paintings and drawings. These works are self-addressed love letters that document his gender transition. To present the complexity of this subject matter, Fake relies upon the open-ended style of abstract art, and reproduces the intricacies of the human body from vibrant forms.
Potential Donor presents the moment a body either accepts or rejects a physical transplant. The background resembles a detail of a circuit-board—a metaphor for connecting components within a larger body. Laid over it, helix-like patterns (an oblique reference to DNA) invade and disappear into a diamond-shaped structure.
July 22, 2020
Through elements of architecture and design, California artist Edie Fake produces colorful and intimately-scaled paintings which metaphorically refer to bodies that exist outside the male/female binary. Purchased with funds from the Keith Shaver Trust, both The Keep (2018), and Partial Donor (2018), exemplify this, and were recently included in the artist's 2018 solo exhibition held at Western Exhibitions, Chicago. These are the first works by the artist to enter the collections.
Source: News, Jan, Feb, Mar 2019
Images (1)
Audio (1)
Edie Fake (American, born 1980)
Potential Donor, 2018
Run Time: 2:18
Recorded by Jared Ledesma, Associate Curator / May 10, 2021
Hi there this is Jared Ledesma Associate Curator at the Art Center and today I'm talking about Edie Fake and his painting Potential Donor. Fake is from Chicago land originally and now lives in and paints in the California desert. I love how once Edie’s gallerists Scott at Western Exhibitions in Chicago he talked about or described Edie Fake’s studio in the desert that it kind of sounded like this small kind of shack like structure where Edie leaves the door open and lets the wind just blow in and blow anything into the studio. I love this image of just picturing Edie Fake painting in the desert in this small metal or shack -like structure just kind of going with it, it sounds awesome. This painting Potential Donor and others created around 2018 are both representative of Edie Fake’s transition. Edie is trans, but also meant to evoke the experience of other trans folks as well. So they’re part diaristic but also meant to represent or relate to other experiences. The work is representative of the moment a body either accepts or rejects an organ transplant which is an experience that many trans folks have undergone. Fake uses imagery related to architecture and design and also biology and kind of breaks down his representation of the body to the very components that make up the body. So we see these structures that look like DNA or these kind of circuit board like figures or shapes in the painting to evoke this idea of the body at its very core.
