Emma Webster

19/09/2022

Before she went to Yale, Webster studied art practice at Stanford, then spent a few years between the Bay Area and San Diego working on interactive advertising installations via apps, bus wraps, and billboards for companies like YouTube and Google, and designing theater sets for La Jolla Playhouse. During a production about Hurricane Katrina, where actors were forced to navigate between an actual body of water and a shifting backdrop, she got her first idea for the “mini-set” process she would realize at Yale. She had another breakthrough after the virtual reality artist Wyatt Roy, a former Stanford classmate, came to stay with her at Yale in 2018. He scanned the maquettes in her New Haven studio and made an exploratory video game from them, which allowed users to interact with her work. Then, in 2020, Roy mailed Webster his Oculus goggles.

19/09/2022

Webster’s trippy vignettes featured all types of Wonka-esque wildlife that enlivened “a malleable, multidimensional world where memories and fantasies intermingle and time and space expand and contract,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

19/09/2022

Emma Webster, Paramount. Courtesy of the artist.

Emma Webster, Nightingale Theater. Courtesy of the artist.

The artist first envisioned these baiting illuminations five years ago while studying for her MFA at Yale, where she created maquettes—puppet theater-sized dioramas that she filled with clay creatures and illuminated via flashlight. Those three-dimensional works informed the paintings in her acclaimed 2019 solo debut, Arcadia, at the Hollywood-based gallery Diane Rosenstein.

19/09/2022

She points to an 8-foot-long canvas foregrounded with a dark, haunting glen behind which exists a bone white valley, cotton candy sky, and vertiginous razor-edged peaks. “You want to get to the source of the light but that doesn’t necessarily strike me as a good place to be in,” she says. “It’s sort of a baiting light.”

19/09/2022

“We always associate light and illumination with a certain level of clarity, but here it’s almost like this tease,” says Webster, who, during a July visit to her studio, is dressed in Crocs, gym shorts, and a magenta Guerilla Girls t-shirt that lists “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist” (Not having to be in shows with men…Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty…Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make, it will be labeled feminine.)

06/09/2022

At a moment in history when social systems are collapsing, the natural world is upending itself, and people are constantly checking out of a reality that is often too surreal to comprehend, Webster’s paintings—created from digital studies of simulated environments—feel unsettlingly relevant. In a way, they might be seen as deep fakes that shine a light on our current landscape of ever-shifting perceptions.

06/09/2022

Since the start of the pandemic, Webster’s increasingly complex tableaux—shaped as much by avant-garde virtual reality simulations as classical set design and theatrical illumination—have been acquired by the Perez Museum, ICA Miami, and MOCA San Diego. In that time, Webster has also mounted solo shows at taste-making galleries like Carl Kostyál (London), Alexander Berggruen (New York), and Stems Gallery (Brussels). The Stanford and Yale alum is currently debuting her most monumental works to date in an exhibition titled Illuminarium (up from August 27 through October 1) at Perrotin in Seoul.

06/09/2022

Directly across from a roller skate shop in an East L.A. industrial park, through a poster-filled vestibule kitchen and a makeshift lounge flanked by racks of paintings, you’ll find the two-story studio of Emma Webster. The 33-year-old Encinitas, California-born artist’s off-kilter landscapes have drawn comparisons, in just a few years, to the compositions of Albert Bierstadt and John Singer Sargent, the Hudson River School, and Walt Disney’s animations.

06/09/2022

Shaped by VR simulations and references as diverse as Baroque Masters and Walt Disney, Webster’s complex tableaux question our perception of reality.

23/08/2022

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