The Villain

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• John Edmonds

  In 2019 Biennial

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  John Edmonds

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  John Edmonds: I'm using photography as a tool to index and make portraits of friends, these sculptures that are from a home in Brooklyn, as well as sculptures that are from West Africa.

  Narrator: Artist John Edmonds.

  John Edmonds: I want to think about this interplay of portraiture and still life, while also introducing these photographs that reimagine these different kinds of Surrealist photographs that were made in the 1930s where artists such as Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten, were using African art and incorporating and appropriating African sculptures into their work.

  I think that they were completely taken out of their context and used simply for the purpose of decoration, fetishization. And in my pictures, what I'm interested in is the spiritual potential that these objects could have in the contemporary world.

  Narrator: Not all of the photographs incorporate African sculpture. Take a moment to find a photograph that focuses on the top of a woman’s head.

  John Edmonds: I really love this picture because the way in which the waves are on the top of the head brings me both to this idea of landscape but also fingerprint too. In many of these pictures I'm using the human figure, not only to talk about representation or history, art history, but also to think about place, and think about the body as a kind of landscape.