Jimmy Edgar is an artist from Detroit, Michigan, known mainly for his musical work, located somewhere between techno, hip hop and glitch, under which he has developed work from 2004 to date, publishing on labels such as Warp, Ultramajic and Innovative Leisure, in addition to contributing as a producer to the work of other artists and working as a video artist and photographer.

These disciplines have led him to consolidate a visual work that has found its niche in the blockchain, where it has been growing rapidly in recent months as a result of several NFT conceptual art drops where Edgar exposes his most abstract, surreal and metaphysical facet, developing not only an exciting reflection on colour, shape and space but also a reliable critical and conceptual process.

As he told in an interview with fellow artist Pilar Zeta at Foundation NFT store and community, his visual process is very detailed and meticulous, yet opening space for intuition: I usually start with one main object, archetype, or symbol—and from there I start to research available 3D objects and symbols to accompany that main idea. After this, he draws on an iPad and creates the 2D sketches, which will function as geometrical guidelines for the 3D image, which then gets animated, moved around and edited, all this in relationship with the conceptual, symbolic and aesthetic guidelines defined earlier.

Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking control, reaffirms Edgar quoting the neo-pop artist Jeff Koons regarding one of the first works to enter the blockchain under the name of JIMMY, called OBSOLETE [1] and conceived as an installation concept that is made up of sculptures based on Dyson vacuum cleaners, hermetically sealed in acrylic, intended as a dialogue [2] with Koons and his work The New exhibited at The New Museum in New York in 1980 and also achieved from a sculptural process with vacuum cleaners.

That is why Edgar follows the direct conceptual line of Koons both in the concept of his artworks and the criticism of commercial and advertising culture that crypto-native art can be powerful for. So, for example, with a Dyson vacuum cleaner assumed as a symbol of mature responsibilities and the ultimate ends of life,  considering the technological connotations of cordless and automatic vacuum cleaners as a way of representing what advances like web3 and blockchain mean nowadays. This idea would continue in another piece called OBSOLESCENCE, and his concept of digital readymade would acquire more force in his work in later months.

OBSOLESCENCE was followed by more NFT pieces like MIRROZ, which was exhibited at Miami Art Basel in the digital crypto art gallery SuperRare’s Monolith. The exhibition consisted of a huge digital canvas placed in the fair to exhibit NFT art on a large scale. The work, minted (integrated into the blockchain) and transferred to SuperRarestore [3] in 2021, shows several rotating virtual mirrors in which endless gradients, lights and colours are projected that bounce off each other in a 3D sequence. This creative pattern would maintain in later works such as PLUSH [4] and more recently in the convulsive HYPERCOLOR [5].

Η συνέχεια εδώ.