Derek Edwards

Derek Edwards, who collects under the name derekedws, holds a portrait in which a monochrome face is sliced across the eyes by a dark rectangular strip, while a bright orange flower settles over one eye like a stray stamp of colour.^2,3 The work is In Absence and Presence by KaliYuga, and it stood among the BrainDrops works recorded for that collecting name in October 2026.^4,3 The flower is the only warm note in the grey face, and the strip turns the act of looking into something withheld.³ Two other figures from the same holding keep it company, a pair of women beside a white vehicle in Roope Rainisto's Life In West America and a lone worker at a table in Ren's Paradise Lost.^4,5,6

Edwards has spoken publicly as a managing partner of Collab Currency and as a co-founder of Glitch Marfa, an analogue gallery for digital objects.⁷ In an October 2024 podcast conversation, Edwards also distinguished a personal portfolio from those of funds and other collective vehicles, so the works discussed here are treated only as part of the holding recorded under the derekedws name.^7,4 That holding ranges widely across the BrainDrops catalogue, and each of the three series considered here is represented in it by more than one work.⁴ The releases also fall within a single year, with Life In West America first minted in February 2023, The Spaces Between Words in June and Paradise Lost at the end of December.^8,9,10 Read in that order, they move from a photographic surface to a collaged one and then to the panels of an illustrated story.^8,9,10

KaliYuga presents The Spaces Between Words as a collage series about the inner landscape of human experience, attentive to memory, emotion and identity and to the unspoken gaps between them.¹¹ Its portraits appear assembled from torn paper, photographs, newsprint, embroidery and flowers, and the series history notes that they are generally set against a plain coloured ground.⁹ In Absence and Presence keeps the solo portrait format but breaks that quiet field, because its recorded background is a torn multicoloured surface rather than a single colour.^3,9 Its heart trait reads Heartless, a value it shares with the examples examined in the series history.^3,9 The title fits what the eye meets: the face is present, yet the strip removes its gaze, and the flower blooms precisely where sight is denied.³ KaliYuga is best known for public notebooks that adapt image models to media such as watercolour and lithography, though no source names how this edition was made.⁹

Quiet Juggernaut, from Life In West America, is the brightest of the three works.⁶ Two women stand beside a white vehicle in full daylight holding red drinks, and the scene carries the warm saturation and soft grain of mid-century colour film that runs through the series.^6,8 Rainisto frames the project as post-photography, an inquiry into America as land, concept and ideal and into the people who inhabit it, with every piece generated from custom-trained models specific to the collection.¹² The series history adds that the artist is based in Finland and had visited the United States only a few times, a distance that colours this version of the West.⁸ The token records a Form of Duality and a landscape orientation, and while the series never explains the Form trait, the paired women make doubling the first thing a viewer registers.^6,8 The title works in the oblique manner of the edition's captions, since nothing in the frame is loud or massive and the juggernaut stays implied.^8,6

Back to the Garage belongs to Paradise Lost, which Ren released as artworks created and curated in the form of a graphic novel about power, friendship and freedom.^5,13 Across the series the story was developed with ChatGPT while no image model is named, and the stated challenge was keeping characters and places consistent through prompting and editing.¹⁰ This panel comes from the epilogue scene of the fifth act, Awakening Humanity, the same closing scene as the series history's example of the protagonist on a crowded street.^5,10 Where that companion sets its hero among moving pedestrians, Back to the Garage contracts the world to a narrow blue-grey interior, where a seated figure in a white shirt works at a table.^5,10 The token's text tells of Hiroshi, Aya and Kenji continuing their work so that technology is used responsibly and ethically, while the picture shows one person alone.⁵ The title reads as a return to the workshop, a modest ending for a story that began with a young inventor in a technological city.^5,10

Placed together, the three works show how differently each series builds a human figure.^3,5,6 KaliYuga's face is flattened and interrupted, a grey photographic likeness under a black bar, with colour arriving as an intrusion.³ Rainisto's women are whole and lit in open air, and their strangeness lies in the photographic conviction of a scene that no camera recorded.^6,8 Ren's figure sits smaller within a tight, cool room, and its meaning gathers through the panel's place in the narrative as much as through the surface.^5,10 A viewer could separate them without captions by colour temperature alone, monochrome with one orange accent, daylight with red drinks, and blue-grey shade around a white shirt.^3,6,5 They also handle sight differently, since the collage blocks the eyes, the photograph lets its subjects stand openly in the sun, and the panel turns its subject toward a task.

Within the holding, these three works span the BrainDrops releases of 2023 from the first edition of that year to the last.^8,10,4 Life In West America opened the year with a staged America, The Spaces Between Words followed with an inward collage, and Paradise Lost closed it with an epilogue set indoors.^8,9,10 What stays in view after the comparison is that orange flower over a covered eye, the single bright interruption in a group otherwise held by daylight and grey rooms.³