From his own perspective, Edmonds reflects on his process, practice, and musings for Elephant Magazine.
In his recent exhibition at Company Gallery, John Edmonds brings together photography, film, and ready-made sculpture in an presentation that considers how images and objects shape our understanding of cultural history. Drawing on African sculpture and encounters with Black sitters, Edmonds creates a visual language that moves between portraiture, still life, and installation. His compositions bring together distinct forms and materials, inviting viewers to consider the relationships that emerge between them.
Across the exhibition, Edmonds experiments with the scale, surface, and presentation of photographic images, extending his practice beyond the frame. Rather than treating photography as a straightforward record of its subjects, he uses the medium to construct encounters between bodies, objects, and histories. The resulting works consider how art can mediate our relationship to the past while creating new possibilities for connection in the present.
Words from the Artist
Through installations including photography, film and ready-made sculpture, I am interested in creating a cosmic context of different poetic encounters and experiences with the ancestors. For the past seven years, my photographic practice has examined African art as a means to forge a connection between the Black human subject and the continent of Africa. I appropriate African sculpture to expand the relationship between the body, history and place. By photographing the body and sculpture interchangeably, I am interested in photography’s ability to assign life while blurring the line between living and non-living.
My photographs and films often consider touch as a methodology to act out a desire for connection, reverence and love. Touch becomes a metaphor for the act of transmission, connecting my sitters to a past that is always present and ever evolving. Through touch, my ambition is to connect ancestral knowledge with the contemporary world. I use light to heighten the texture of the photographic surface in order to create a sense of tactility in the picture plane. More recently, I utilize black and white photography to create images that critique the photography’s relationship to truth, while color is used to anchor the viewer back into the present moment.
My photographs are printed at a myriad of scales to disrupt the seriality of photography and to challenge the relationship between subject and viewer. I collect African sculptures from various street vendors throughout New York city and mine different art collections such as the Museum of Art and Origins as my source material. My sitters are people I meet in a multitude of ways such as social media apps, passerbys on the streets of New York and gatherings amongst different creative communities in the city. Desire and attraction play a major role in my casting–the beauty of a man’s profile or the chiseled nature of his bust becomes synonymous with the formal beauty of carved wood.
Spirit and intimacy are core themes within my practice. I address these themes by considering the display and treatment of African sculpture within and beyond the picture plane. Sitters kiss, fondle, caress and become one with objects. Ultimately, the ambition of my work is to pay homage to the beauty, power and ingenuity of African sculpture while centering the Black human subject’s relationship to it as creator and muse.
