Edie Duffy’s Singularity

Edie Duffy’s photorealism doesn’t just document—it distorts. Mining eBay’s throwaway images, she renders objects with a fixation that turns the banal into the surreal, collapsing nostalgia, obsolescence, and digital-age vertigo into a vision both unsettling and precise.

Artists

By Amelia Winata

Issue 2, Spring/Summer 2024/25

Table of Contents

Edie Duffy is the surest example of the product not matching the description. In a short period, the Naarm-based artist has cemented her position as a photo-realist painter, revered in circles of cool post-graduate art students that would usually sneer at this style of painting. Duffy acknowledges that photo-realism is “daggy.” It conjures up cringe images of Michael Zavros flanked by luxury cars and taxidermy. A prominent artist recently exclaimed that they hate photorealism — but like Duffy’s work. And that’s the gist of it.