Keith Edmier at the Hessel Museum

Keith Edmier’s 1998 sculptures, “Victoria Regia (First night bloom)” and “Victoria Regia (Second Night Bloom).”
Sex, death and religion, art’s old stand-bys, its holy trinity, are alive, weird and living, at “Keith Edmier 1991-2007” at Hessel Museum in Bard College, Holland Cotter writes. “With a title like an epitaph, sculptures like wax museum effigies, and a 1970s ranch-house interior, as quiet as a chapel, at its center, Mr. Edmier’s retrospective is one of the more bizarre to come along in a while. In it, exacting craftsmanship has the chill of the mortician’s art. Period kitsch and personal angst are inseparable. Memory is both a truth serum and embalming medium.

Installation view of “Bremen Towne” (2006-07)
Mr. Edmier was born in Chicago in 1967 and grew up nearby in suburban Tinley Park. He was a formidable sculptor when he was barely into his teens, cooking up clay models for masks and prosthetic devices inspired by horror and monster films. During high school he made contact with special-effects makeup artists. In 1985, Mr. Edmier moved to Los Angeles to work on films, among them David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly.” He also enrolled at California Institute of the Arts, where he had a formative immersion in the neo-conceptualist and appropriation art being grouped under the label of post-modernism. His stay there was short — a year — but it directed his career goals from popular film to art and prompted a relocation to New York City in 1990.

Installation view of “Bremen Towne.”
Mr. Edmier was born in Chicago in 1967 and grew up nearby in suburban Tinley Park. He was a formidable sculptor when he was barely into his teens, cooking up clay models for masks and prosthetic devices inspired by horror and monster films. During high school he made contact with Dick Smith, the special-effects makeup artist responsible for Linda Blair’s spinning head in “The Exorcist,”and through him with Rick Baker, once Mr. Smith’s student, in Hollywood.
In 1985, Mr. Edmier moved to Los Angeles to work on films, among them David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly.” He also enrolled at California Institute of the Arts, where he had a formative immersion in the neo-conceptualist and appropriation art being grouped under the label of post-modernism. His stay there was short — a year — but it directed his career goals from popular film to art and prompted a relocation to New York City in 1990.

“Cycas Orogeny” (2003-4)
There he was a studio assistant to Matthew Barney, who encouraged him to take the subjects that mattered to him most as the material for his art. He did so, and those subjects — eroticism, mortality and autobiography — are the substance of the 16-year survey.

“I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues” (1991)
The earliest piece, “I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues” (1991) is an oil painting of a smiling Janis Joplin posing with a toddler in a tiger costume. The Joplin portrait is based on a photograph taken in 1970, the year she died of a drug overdose. The child in the picture is the artist himself, age 3, in a 1970 family snapshot. The title of the piece is from Don McLean’s 1971 song “American Pie,” which refers to Joplin and was, Mr. Edmier says in an exhibition catalog with special effects of its own, including a skin-pink rubber dust jacket, his childhood introduction to the idea of death and loss.

“Beverly Edmier, 1967” (1998)
The startling sculpture called “Beverly Edmier, 1967,” is another Madonna and Child image, one that takes Mr. Edmier even further back into his past. It’s a life-size figure, cast in translucent pink plastic, of his own pregnant mother carrying him as a fetus curled up in her transparent womb. Like much of Mr. Edmier’s art, it has many referential layers that connect it with larger histories.
Beverly’s seated pose echoes that of Abraham Lincoln, another Illinois resident, in the Lincoln Memorial. And she is dressed in a facsimile of the pink Chanel suit that Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing the day her husband was assassinated.

“Jill Peters” (1997)
“Jill Peters” (1997) is a full-length portrait of Mr. Edmier’s grade-school sweetheart as a virginal ghost of true loves past. Cast in snow-white polyvinyl, wearing white clothes and a luxuriant pale platinum wig, and smiling as she casts her eyes upward, she is a prepubescent idol with a Farrah Fawcett ’do, St. Jill of Perpetual Uplift. Humbert Humbert would have knelt at her Earth Shoes-clad feet.

Detail of “Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000.” (2000-02)
And after you pass through that, you come to another type of memorial in a sculptural group called “Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000.” In 1977, a pinup poster of the actress in a bathing suit was a national best seller; the pre-adolescent Mr. Edmier had one on his bedroom wall. In 1998, he introduced himself to his childhood muse. 
Before she had had any thoughts of acting, Ms. Fawcett had been an art student, specializing in sculpture, at the University of Texas in Austin. Mr. Edmier invited her to return to her initial avocation and collaborate with him on a project. She accepted and, working together in a California studio, they made nude portraits of each other. 

Detail of “Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000.” (2000-02)
Mr. Edmier portrays Ms. Fawcett as a coyly self-covering nymph, tousle-haired, ear to the ground as if listening, with a vacant stare, to something. By contrast, Ms. Fawcett’s bronze portrait of Mr. Edmier is a full-frontal affair, its blandly handsome subject leaning back against what could be a rock, eyes shut. He’s like a sunbather, or space-traveling Adam, or a St. Sebastian unconscious of arrows to come.
This drowsing figure makes an aptly contradictory symbol for an art that approaches the past as both a wishful ideal and as a time-haunted, mortality-ridden fiction. Mainstream modernism spent the better part of a century trying to control that fiction, to scrape it clean, make it abstract, elevate it, bury it. But like the vengeful ghost of Carrie White, who may be Mr. Edmier’s real muse, it keeps popping back up, demanding acknowledgment, pulling us back down into the earth. Postmodernism can be defined by the tension of that two-way pull. So can the spoiled sensuality of Mr. Edmier’s abject devotional art.