Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.
Palm Jumeirah
foam, resin, plastic, steel, wood, latex paint, putty, concrete
8' x 8' x 6'
2015
Elana Webb takes the tension between her own Midwestern Americanism and an attraction to the concept of the tropical and foreign paradise, and seeks to tease out the complexities of iconography and social meaning within this space.
By using unforgiving materials whose backgrounds are rooted in labor, Webb teases out issues of frailty within large-scale commercial construction projects that are marketed as extraordinary. Her resulting work is expressly delicate, sensual, and sometimes violent. Webb modernizes the meaning that paradise evokes, combining natural dreamscapes with manufactured ideas of the built.
Her installation includes a dark resin pool in the outline of the slowly sinking Palm Jumeirah Islands, Dubai, flanked by plastic curtains with looming images of stingrays, barracudas, and skeletal beachgoers. The human-made archipelago of the Palm Jumeirah, fantastic in scope, creates an ersatz utopia based on immigrant labor and class segregation. In other work, she uses still life imagery in conjunction with industrial materials; in her recent installation Utopic No. 1, she brings together marble, plastic pillars, a fabric egg, and a grapefruit, all teetering on six tons of dune-like gravel. Pierced from behind, the epicene foods float above a pedestal of classic architecture, both elevated and precarious.
Also seen in Webb’s work is an interest in human-made substitutes for natural environments taken to extremes, as seen in the case of the Palm Jumeirah. Inherent in this particular fabricated paradise are myriad underlying problems, ranging from cheap migrant labor and dangerous practices to a stagnant marine ecology. Notably, however, the image of the Jumeirah takes precedence: the ultimate paradisiacal symbol of the palm, ostensibly visible from the moon (yet visually unextraordinary on the ground), serves as both brilliant marketing tool and potent picture of fraught, constructed paradise.