{"id":524,"date":"2010-06-03T14:27:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T20:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2010\/06\/03\/edie-roberson\/"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:45:37","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:45:37","slug":"edie-roberson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/edie-roberson\/","title":{"rendered":"Edie Roberson: Fool Me Twice. Please."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nEdie Roberson<\/a>\u00a0is the sort of painter who would rather not settle for one accomplishment when she can manage three, or six, or so many that viewers may never spot them all, let alone count them, even as she makes an audience feel that far from showing off, she just wants to share the fun she gets from looking closely at things and seeing how they fit together. Contemplate, for example, the postcard announcing her expansive show of current and past work in the Main Library\u2019s gallery. Titled \u201cLittle Women at the Stream,\u201d\u00a0it looks on first viewing like a nature study, a close-up color photograph of water flowing over gravel and driftwood, bordered by stones and green plants, to which the artist has apparently glued four figures cut from art magazines. Three of them are Japanese woodblock fisherwomen, printed with black outlines delineating drapery across otherwise flat areas of color and pattern. Sharing the stream with them is Rembrandt\u2019s wife Hendrickje, her shift hiked up to the point of compromising her modesty, painted realistically according to the style of her time\u20141654\u2014but clearly made of oil. The scale matches perfectly, with the tiny reproductions just the right size to fit convincingly into the miniature landscape. But as the eye and mind come to an agreement that they will admire such accomplished collaging of three teasingly mismatched historical eras, each with its own appropriate medium and style, just then some dilatory mental organ chimes in with the belated realization that not only is none of this real in the conventional sense\u2014that is, that it\u2019s a picture\u2014but the theorizing eye and brain were fooled twice. The entire scene was painted, convincingly enough to fool even professionals, by Edie Roberson.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The first level of Roberson\u2019s art is her pure skill in rendering, where she shows how discipline frees the artist\u2019s imagination, and a convincing likeness delivers a kind of power that mere suggestions cannot approach. The hand-addressed envelope pinned to a fragment of raw siding in \u201cTo Whom It May Concern\u201d\u00a0may initially come off as a tour-de-force display of trompe-l\u2019oeil rendering, but as the eye attempts to unravel the magic, crucial details like the price on the embossed stamp, the number of thumbtack holes, and extensive weathering penetrate one’s awareness. This isn\u2019t just a story the viewer doesn\u2019t know: it\u2019s a mystery. Resisting being seen as a picture while maintaining a feeling of restraint gives this and several larger works, including \u201cDoors,\u201d \u201cThe Dress,\u201d and \u201cThrough the Window Into the Past,\u201d an emotional charge, and for some a spiritual feeling, that such mundane and anonymous subjects wouldn\u2019t ordinarily have.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There is a theory that humor comes about when frames of reference play each other for fools, and for every somber mood Roberson depicts she offers nine more lively vistas. In case we don\u2019t comprehend her visual advice that we \u201cLighten Up,\u201d she puts it in just so many words on the most intimidating of local symbols.\u00a0Her version of the Temple is a printed sheet-metal toy, complete with \u201cSTOP-GO\u201d switch and a hand crank for turning out assembly-line weddings. All the details, from tourists with their cameras to birds nesting in the crenelations, are toys, with mold lines or joints emphasizing their bilateral symmetry, many sporting keys to wind them up. Anyone tempted to castigate the artist is likely to be flummoxed by the realism of the depiction: surely someone somewhere is making, or at least once manufactured during a Golden Age of Play, the original travesty that she has only copied.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The closer some things come to their boundaries, the more obvious those limits become. Realism, at least in Edie Roberson\u2019s hands, is not one of them. Her imitation of three-dimensional reality becomes so real in places that when it crosses over one can\u2019t be sure just what is what. Who hasn\u2019t looked into a mirror or a glass paperweight and ached with the desire to penetrate those illusory spaces? For Roberson, one response was to craft her images in the round, creating scale models of the open road that she saves from qualifying for the natural history museum’s collection of dusty dioramas by invoking the brush of Vincent Van Gogh. The most optically challenging, \u201cA Woodland Ballad,\u201d\u00a0actually wraps around a corner from one wall to another, and with its mix of illusionistic painting and actual trees presents such frustration to the eye that it ends up agreeing not to care whether the space is round or flat if it will just make a choice.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The composition of Roberson\u2019s figures are just as important as their identities; there is more than one joke waiting for those who can tell a fragile celluloid doll, like the anxious Betty Boop in \u201cBetty\u2019s Jungle Walk,\u201d\u00a0from the quartet of lead sportsmen (those thin rifle barrels would always get bent) who inhabit \u201cHunter\u2019s Bad Dream.\u201d\u00a0Searching the more densely populated scenes, like the two dozen or so characters riding the carousel in \u201cAnd Around She Goes,\u201d reveals delights hidden like Easter eggs: Harry Lime from the movie \u201cThe Third Man\u201d riding the carousel, no doubt contemplating the Renaissance and the Cuckoo Clock. <\/b>Over at the Temple, Humpty-Dumpty sits on the surrounding wall. Meanwhile, the disparate sources of the women in \u201cThe Ladies\u2019 Club\u201d\u00a0and the men in \u201cThe Men\u2019s Club\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>transcend their differing features to give a sense of the way our individuality feels so much greater on the inside than it looks on the outside.<\/p>\n