Don Edler
NADA Miami 2021
Booth P22

HSFA is pleased to participate in NADA Miami with a solo project by Los Angeles based artist Don Edler. Over the past several years Edler has developed a series of wall-bound sculptures made of found and recycled materials gathered from the refuse of entertainment production jobs. Incorporating a combination of handmade marks, urban detritus, and cast forms these works recall cryptic petroglyphs or the semiotic carved stone tablets and mytho-monumental sculptures of ancient civilization updated to reflect the materials and narratives of the anthropocentric era. In them we encounter the future ruins of our present culture. The array of detritus is embedded within the surface of modular carved wood panels and coated in a thick impasto of artist-made wax, giving the impression that the entire object is a bas relief composed of a single enigmatic material. The assemblage of found objects produces glyph-like associations, and upon deeper viewing stories begin to emerge communicating the myths, histories and values of our time. Informed by various current political conversations such as biopolitics and climate change, the diffuse compositions contain dynamic and on-going portraits of human life on Earth. Edler's sculptures function as a reminder of our shifting understanding of what constitutes "the natural" in an ecology increasingly influenced by human-made materials and circumstances.

Burn Tablet (2019) was made in response to the massive Camp Fire in Northern California (2018), the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history. While this work commemorates a specific tragedy, it also points to larger causal issues which reveal this event to be indicative of humanity’s current relationship with its habitat. As the first landscape in Edler’s “Tablet” series, the most dominant compositional element is an aerial view of the fire’s burn zone, the shape of the area’s perimeter recessed into the surface. The remainder of the work’s expansive face is littered with broken, fragmental found objects. Edler burned the wooden panels that comprise the substrate before coating the entire work in a layer of black homemade surf wax. The resulting appearance is at once dessicated and organic yet austere and synthetic, suggesting an imaginal stratum of anthropocentric sediment - a mutant conglomerate of scorched earth, plastic bones and e-waste. The abyssal palette engages an art-historical lineage of black monochrome painting, while the underlying distribution of overlapping marks recall a palimpsest of ancient petroglyphs or an archeological excavation.

Prototype Tablet 1 (Silicone) (2017) exemplifies the material and formal exploration of the series. A shaped tablet of sterile white cast silicone is inlaid within a rectilinear panel of carved wood. The wooden layer is painted with a homemade wax created by melting together every color of Crayola crayon. The resulting shade of matte eggplant is echoed in a metallic finish by the thin frame of powder-coated steel. The graphic color blocking and subtle interplay of pattern and texture recall various strategies of abstract composition, accentuated by an elegant balance of relief and counter relief. While most of the dimensional elements appear ruinous and obscure, the work’s most legible motif is a raised handprint, an age-old icon of humanity’s presence and creative expression, connecting this work to a continuum of mark-making that stretches from the paleolithic to the present.      

Don Edler was born in Bremen, Germany in 1988 and immigrated to the United States as a child, where he grew up in South Florida. Edler received an MFA in Studio Art from New York University, and a BFA in Sculpture from University of Florida, Gainesville FL, and also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison ME. Recent solo exhibitions include Tablets 2017-2021, B___ (B Space), Los Angeles CA (2021); Devil You Know, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles CA (2021); Two Minutes To Midnight, Hunter Shaw Fine Art (2019); 6871 California Ave, Five Car Garage, Los Angeles, CA (2018); The Father The Sun and The Holy Road, San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA (2016).