Edie Nadelhaft

Towards the end 2020, it occurred to me that I no longer experienced the world at large. Rather, I watched it. On TV, on my phone, on my laptop. I was forced to postpone a series of paintings I'd been working on because they were based on imagery captured while riding my motorcycle around the country. I subsequently returned to the one subject that is always accessible: my own body. 
“Cloud Iris” represents a hybrid, or bridge between my road-trip paintings and my current paintings which are oil on shaped-canvas depictions of greatly enlarged human irises and fingertips framed in busy gold-leaf. Musings on surveillance, identity, preciousness and psychedelic sexiness run through this work, alongside my ongoing preoccupation with the vitality and vulnerability inherent in existing in a physical body. But ultimately it boils down to an extreme form of portraiture that combines the tropes and techniques of the centuries-long tradition with the tools and ideologies of the digital age.