Sometimes you stumble upon work that’s so mesmerizing it’s difficult to explain. Benjamin Edmiston’s pieces are that kind of work. And as I struggled to find the correct adjectives to describe them, I succumbed to the eloquent way as to which the artist did so himself.
Bejamin explains: “My compositions feature unusual or fantastical settings inhabited by ominous characters depicted in a flat and decorative style. My bold, and often symmetrical, drawings offer a plane of floating heads, half-skinned snakes, and bodiless arms. Building a personal vocabulary with such imagery recalls for me the tension of an early, crude Mickey Mouse cartoon, or a misplaced folk sculpture standing eerily on a dusty shelf. The creation of a familiar but askew world — the sensation of the unheimlich is what fuels my work.”
