Emma Webster’s landscape paintings teleport viewers into the otherworldly. The places she depicts, convincing and hallucinatory, merge spatial expectations with mystifying fantasy. The paintings come from a hybrid sketching-sculpting process within screen-space. Webster first constructs scenes in virtual reality, which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion. Of her VR models, Webster says: “Working from within the still-life is more akin to how we go about the world. There can be no ‘outside.’”

Illuminarium plays with our notions of the virtual. Webster’s fluid transcription of 2D into 3D, and vice versa onto canvas, cheekily insinuates a new iteration of collage. This kneading technique between media, of fleshing out then flattening, clarifying then obfuscating, refines the unreal worlds. The New Yorker has praised her “imaginative approach to the centuries-old genre of landscape,” and her forays inhabit a curious tension as it tempers cutting-edge technology with a time-honed tradition of painting.

Emma Webster (b. 1989) is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, 2011) and Yale University, where she received an MFA in Painting in 2018. In 2021, Webster published Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality, a book which collects, among other things, her musings on landscape and image-making in an increasingly digital world.

View of the exhibition 'Illuminarium' at Perrotin Dosan Park, Seoul, 2022. Photo: Kim Yongkwan. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin