ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.-This fall, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College will present the most comprehensive exhibition to date of American artist Keith Edmier, whose deeply self-referential works are known for inextricably linking the artist's personal life with pop culture iconography. In addition to including a broad selection of the strikingly personal works Edmier has created over the past 16 years, Keith Edmier 1991-2007 will feature an installation commissioned by the CCS, Bremen Towne, a full-scale sculptural reproduction of the artist's childhood Chicago home.

Curated by CCS Bard executive director Tom Eccles, Keith Edmier 1991-2007 will be on view in the CCS Galleries from October 20, 2007 through February 3, 2008. The opening reception is Saturday, October 20 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Museum hours are Wednesdays- Sundays, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Ranging from Edmier's earliest works, such as I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues (1991) through Bremen Towne, a major installation created specifically for the exhibition at CCS Bard, Keith Edmier: 1991-2007 presents a remarkable overview of Edmier's work. It demonstrates not only the power of the artist's use of his autobiographical landscape as a foil for considering a collective experience, but also his technical expertise as a sculptor.

Many of Edmier's works build upon and expose the intersections between his personal world and such American cultural touchstones as motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel, with whom he collaborated, and Janis Joplin, Farrah Fawcett, and John Lennon. "Through the act of sculpture he voraciously pursues his memories," writes curator Tom Eccles, citing both Jill Peters (1997), a "virginal portrait of his childhood sweetheart standing awkwardly in her sweater, skirt, and bobby socks" constructed in wax from a yearbook picture, and Beverly Edmier, 1967 (1998), a portrait of the artist's mother, in which the yet-to-be-born artist is revealed through the stomach of his seated mother.

For Keith Edmier: 1991-2007, the artist is creating a major new installation Bremen Towne, a full-scale reproduction of the interior spaces from the ranch home in which he grew up in Tinley Park, a southwest suburb of Chicago. "It is being made to resemble what it would have looked like when I first moved there with my parents in 1971," the artist writes. "Bremen Towne will function as a curated space - an exhibition of those things which influenced my early aesthetic development in the surroundings that helped to shape me."

His most ambitious work to date, Bremen Towne (2007) is the largest physical manifestation of the artist's fascination with reclaiming, or at least rethinking, the past through sculpture and installation. This extraordinary installation represents the culmination of Edmier's psychological archeology.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Center for Curatorial Studies and Booth-Clibburn Editions, London, are very pleased to publish Keith Edmier 1991-2007, a new book exploring Edmier's work in remarkable depth. Including essays by Tom Eccles, Douglas Fogle, and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, a thorough guide to the source material for Edmier's work by the artist's longtime friend, Jade Dellinger, as well as an interview with Keith Edmier by artist Matthew Barney and a comprehensive bibliography, the book will be officially released at the opening reception of the Keith Edmier 1991-2007 exhibition at CCS Bard on October 20.

Keith Edmier - Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1967, Keith Edmier grew up the suburban subdivision of Bremen Towne in Tinley Park, 45 minutes southwest of Chicago. After graduating high school, Edmier pursued a career in special effects in Hollywood. Encouraged by special effects master Rock Baker, Edmier briefly attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. After leaving art school he moved to New York to enter the art world. Edmier's work has been shown at some of the most influential museums in the world, such as the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum, New York, and is in the collections of such major museums as the Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Israel Museum. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2001 Biennial Award.