Memory Palaces

by Edie Fake

"In his ecstatic gateways, Fake pays tribute, mourns the loss of, and meditates on the lives of departed friends. The ballpoint pen and gouache drawings take the form of thresholds, passageways, and transitional spaces using visually striking patterns and fantasy architecture. Fake's pictorial spaces expand and collapse, memorializing lives and building a community of celebratory facades in honor of his friends." Thomas Robertello Galley

Genres: History, Art

16 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Edie Fake is notoriously morally bankrupt and has an insatiable appetite for destruction. He lives in Chicago where he is currently working at Quimbys bookstore. In the Spring of 2006, Edie performed in the PeaceCore Book Tour across the whole country with collaborator Dewayne Slightweight. In 2007 he and Dewayne unveiled a new work called “Rainbow Dawn” at Art In General in New York. He draws the food fetish zine Foie Gras, the comic Rico McTaco and the recently completed zine Unisex. Gaylord Phoenix, a collection of his mini-comics was released by Secret Acres in 2010. His spirit animal is possibly a “rainbow colored weasel” and he is a Virgo-loving virgo. Both errorless heiress and myopic neurotic, he potentially has an FBI file and unreliable psychic ESPs.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edie Fake makes paintings of 16 buildings, queer spaces important in the history of Chicago, completely reimagined with elaborate ornamentation. Fake is an artist, illustrator, comics artist, and I'm also agreeing with others that it is a silent comic (except for the names of the buildings), proceeding through the largely below the surface glbt history of Chicago. Bars, clubs, theaters, places no longer here. Such a cool idea. There's a kind of sadness in the project, since many of these places were hidden and are now gone, but in the jazzy color and ornamentation Fake makes the process into a kind of celebration! It's not what happens IN the buildings, just the buildings themselves, it's about architecture, and memory, and memory palaces (see below). But then again, by the ornamentation he IS suggesting what was happening in these spaces was important, good.

Read this review from Karen Peltier and Brandon Soderbergh so you can see the artwork, which is wonderful, and the review itself is filled with thoughtful analysis:

http://animalnewyork.com/2014/edie-fake/

What IS a memory palace?

"The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places"), also called the memory palace or mind palace technique, is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria)." Wikipedia

This one is awesome, an illustrated guide on how to build your own memory palace:

http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Memory...

And do you like Sherlock's memory technique (ala the PBS Sherlock, Benedict version)?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-cu...

Another review connecting Keilor Roberts and Edie Fake's work!

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/...