Edna Floretta was born in the grey shades of the midwest in 1972. Being a mind of intense color was very disturbing to the rural folks around her and she got much in the way of art direction from tot to teen. ” They told me to draw a lighthouse, so I did. They told me to sketch a portrait, so I did. They told me to paint a sunset, so I did. ” What she successfully failed to do in the end was to succumb to the classical box that can imprison so many.
Traveling from Ohio to San Francisco to finish her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, Edna began a journey that would ultimately lead to the conclusion that there is no art, only artists, and to be one is not a thing which can be taught, nor escaped from. Driven by the unconscious flow of concepts and creation through the exploration of the self, Edna divorced the chronological and embraced an avenue contradictory to the mindwashing aesthetics of socially acceptable art forms.
Her work is replete with themes of female roles and eroticism, societal conundrums and pop culture exploitation that rigorously attack the viewer’s expectations of video as shaped by conventional cimema. The format is raw in this age of techno junkies, as listening to a record player scratching out rough recordings of Robert Johnson, simply because sometimes the most perfect moods of life cannot wait for film to be loaded or a boom mic to be set up. Creation is not plagued here by preparation. It is capturing moments that are not and could never be scripted, a reality that is strange and funny, prodding and poignant.
She has been called, ” …. the ghost of Karen Finley…” by internationally recognized conceptual dog and guerilla artist Tony Labat. She is in her own words, ” … just looking for life.” On the icy stage that fears the sentimental, Edna Floretta lights a stick of wax and it becomes a conflagration that even the coldest breath is disintegrated by.
IN HER OWN WORDS
Throughout my rants, pranks, and passions i am a “rain” artist. One who goes beyond multi-media to work in any means possible. The artist like a cloud absorbs water from all of society, then storms down in expressive outbursts. Like a shaman between this world and the next, a rain artist’s work is as natural as taking a breath.
My work whimsically explores the interior and exterior definitions of the self. The beginning is the end and the end the beginning. Conundrums, juxtapositions, and ladybugs. Emotions build up inside that come from interactions with the exterior world. Eating all of this from a working class perspective. Shall we do a rain dance?
DINNER, SEX, CHURCH, and TEQUILA,
Edna Floretta.
