SPOTLIGHT
Ed Myers
by Jessica Pirani
Origami Twitter birds wing behind a muse in The Silent Generation,
chirping their 140-character messages on the breeze while a baby girl
pecks at the typewriter of social change. In his Typewriter City series,
Ed Myers addresses our modernity and facility of communication, while
picturing women to acknowledge a feminine emergence from behind
apron strings and into the workforce.
The son of a stay-at-home mom and a mechanic, Myers nods at his roots
while branching ever upward to examine the analog technologies of the
industrial revolution. He finds increasingly digital means of expressing
the ideas and innovations about which he avidly reads, then digests
into art.
that transitions from a car to a pig, going from rolling to walking.” The
work winks at Ford’s assembly line inspiration, which hatched from his
observations at a slaughterhouse.
Insightfully, he touches on the perceived and intrinsic values of what
is created by hand. “I completely conceptualize everything, first, in the
computer,” he begins. As a digital artist, he’s sensible of the fetishized
label, “hand-crafted,” and the idea that many don’t acknowledge digital art as fine art. At the time of his fledgeling efforts, digital art “was
looked down upon because [people] didn’t understand it or understand
how it was created—because they think everything needs to be painted
by hand. I do paint by hand, but on a digital screen, and I kept pushing
harder to get things that you cannot do in traditional mediums with
multiple layers and animation—and that made it unique.”
The illusionist’s most ambitious (and avant-garde) mixed media work
fuses 2- and 3-D tableaux with animated elements that rise up like
islands on a flat horizon. These elements are then reabsorbed into his Myers’ cap is feathering as he correlates the advent of technology with
images’ edges as if they are pecking through the work, tweeting his the harbingers of social change. This year, he has stacked up three Best
in Show awards with events lined up throughout the season—rain notstory yet further into the future.
withstanding.
Looking out the rearview mirror in his Patent Pending series, Myers
reflects on inventors—“Edison was a very good businessman,” he said.
“For instance, I have a piece called Tin Lizzie about Henry Ford. There’s
You can see more at:
an eyepiece which is a headlight…inside the eyepiece is an animation
LionOptic.com
The Silent Generation, digital media
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