Edie Duffy’s Singularity
Edie Duffy’s photorealism doesn’t just document—it distorts. Mining eBay’s throwaway images, she renders objects with a fixation that turns the banal into the surreal, collapsing nostalgia, obsolescence, and digital-age vertigo into a vision both unsettling and precise.
Edie Duffy is the surest example of the product not matching the description. In a short period, the Naarm-based artist has cemented her position as a photo-realist painter, revered in circles of cool post-graduate art students that would usually sneer at this style of painting. Duffy acknowledges that photo-realism is “daggy.” It conjures up cringe images of Michael Zavros flanked by luxury cars and taxidermy. A prominent artist recently exclaimed that they hate photorealism — but like Duffy’s work. And that’s the gist of it.
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Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) is a film without images—just a luminous ultramarine field and an evocative soundtrack. Made as he was dying of AIDS-related illness, Blue resists spectacle, embracing abstraction, memory, and loss. Thirty years on, it continues to evolve, expanding across artists, mediums, and generations.
Kim Gordon grinds handrails with a Jazzmaster, vacuums in MNZ heels, and sings of capitalism’s end while modelling for its tastemakers. Object of Projection channels the aesthetics of resistance, but is it rebellion or just another symptom of “conservative cool”?
