Emma Webster

That Thought Might Think presents new panoramic paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Emma Webster, at Petzel Gallery, New York. The works on show are Webster’s largest to date, and depict expansive, revelatory vistas of genesis and apocalypse. Painted amid the Los Angeles fires, her two paintings offer a front row seat into dramatic, fantastical maquettes of rupturing landscapes. Morphing light, space, and scale, Webster speaks to the precarity of the natural world and the role of artifice.
 
These latest paintings are deeply rooted in the context of ecological crisis. Webster says: “It was surreal to make this work while just outside the studio; the orange, smoky sky was raining ash from the fires.”

Yet, Webster celebrates the power and resilience of natural systems, both surreal and sophisticated, through her constructed environments. They are virtual plein-air paintings of supernatural landscapes that do not represent real-world places. However, they are places which absorb the viewer, familiar yet not, further illuminating the complex entanglements of the Anthropocene.
 
To create her paintings, Webster fuses VR technology, penned sketches, and scans of hand-made sculptures. She translates her digital dioramas to the painted plane, integrating inventive means to advance the genre of still life. With both digital and analog tools, Webster expands on the rich history of artists commandeering technologies, such as the Claude glass or camera obscura.

By building an entire set in virtual reality, Webster expands the planes of her enveloping paintings. Her landscapes take on an immersive quality, like a proxy for reality, becoming avatars of the natural world. The unsettling panoramas in That Thought Might Think intertwine the material and the virtual, where the bounds of reality become increasingly elusive. In an era where seamless technologies chase the knife’s edge of sentience, Webster highlights the urgency of our relationship to the natural, the simulated, and the real

Emma Webster’s eerie compositions are invitations to travel beyond traditional vistas and into seductively hybrid environments that metabolize, materialize, and alchemize. Rendered in oil paint, her landscapes are simultaneously imaginary and familiar, gravity-defying yet abiding an internal order.

To arrive at this logic, the artist methodically works and reworks her compositions, distilling them through various media and technical processes – including virtual and augmented reality, digital rendering, and ultimately painting. Her process is both analog and technological, traditional and speculative.

In this regard, Webster is a decidedly twenty-first century landscape painter, one that subverts convention (like plein-air painting) to virtually paint from the inside, outside, and underside of unlikely panoramas. She applies a formal ambiguity that stops short of all-out abstraction. In this world there are no signs of human life, and even the flora and fauna are alien. All is chimera. As the ambiguous forms merge with the landscape.

CURRENT EXHIBITION
EMMA WEBSTER
THAT THOUGHT MIGHT THINK
PETZEL GALLERY
NEW YORK

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