An opening reception is planned for 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 29, at The Cole Art Center. An artist talk and walk-through will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15.
This exhibition spans over seven years and includes a wide range of Edmondson’s works from four artist residencies and three published books. The works reveal a significant shift in the artist’s practice, begun in a period of upheaval, and still evolving today.
Edmondson writes in this artist statement: “The works presented in this exhibition span a seven-plus year period in which my imagery began to stray from its initial concepts and became sidetracked or hijacked by discoveries made along the way. I embraced a deliberate decision to become less constrained by a work’s initial intent and attempted to construct images in less premeditated ways – to straddle a line between intention and response. I’ve come to view these works as a kind of “bashful modernism” – formal and abstract, but without certainty or ostentation. In much the way we ourselves are, these works have all been shaped by the unexpected.”
The exhibition presents works on paper ranging in scale from 8.5 inches by 11 inches to nearly 8 feet by 6 feet.
Edmondson earned a B.F.A. from the University of Tennessee – Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including Fulbright and DAAD fellowships to Germany, and residency fellowships to Artpark, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute and Kuenstlerwerkstatt Munich. His upcoming exhibitions “Dark Matter” with physicist and poet Agnes Vojta at the Smalter Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, and solo exhibition “Before Language” at the Blanden Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, are scheduled for Spring 2022. He may be reached at gregedmondson.net or voegel60@gmail.com.
Admission to the exhibition and reception, which is sponsored in part by William Arscott, the Friends of the Visual Arts and The Flower Shop, is free. Cole Art Center hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. For more information, call (936) 468-5500.