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.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Edie Duffy’s Singularity by Amelia Winata is featured in full in Issue 2 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
Archie Moore’s “impoverished aesthetic” transforms memory, class, and race into immersive, unsettling worlds. Rejecting the tidy self-disclosure of trauma narratives, his work lingers in ambiguity—neither confession nor critique, but something in between.