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| | artnet.com Magazine Features - All at Once |
 | | Benjamin Edwards, "Convergence," Sept. 7-Oct. 6, 2001, at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. Sometimes a good artist's first show feels more like their second show -- the exhibition after a dazzling debut, wherein gains are consolidated, weaknesses dealt with and directions altered. |
 | | In Jasper Johns' famous words, Edwards depicts "things the mind already knows." We might add "things we know too well." His work confirms that both the strip-city sprawl endemic in L.A. and the mind-numbing nullity of architecture-as-advertising-as-architecture now blight the entire country. |
 | | Duchamp called this overlapping, episodic agglomeration "dismultiplication" or "elementary parallelism." The Futurists called it "a new dimensionality." Whatever it is, Edwards strikes a balance between moralizing and hysteria, the pared-down and the psyched-up, while channeling the spirits of Eadweard Muybridge, Al Held, Zaha Hadid, Matthew Ritchie and Peter Halley. |
| www.artnet.com /magazine/features/saltz/saltz10-3-01.asp (850 words) |
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