Daniel Webby – Costa Concordia

Daniel Webby – Costa Concordia

source : http://eyecontactsite.com/2012/09/trio-as-of-limit

 

Daniel Webby, Costa Concordia, 2012, jigsaw puzzle pieces, clay, plaster, cardboard, aluminium prop. Photo: Xin Cheng

 

Daniel Webby‘s sculptures are more opaque in their intention, and less retinally alluring. His works are ‘raw’ in the sense that they emphasise the rough unpainted surfaces of the materials used and focus on creative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller (there is bamboo geodesic dome that contains a lecture space for social interaction) and Jean Luc Godard.

Godard’s 2010 film Socialism features the luxury liner Costa Concordia that later got wrecked off the coast of Italy. This ship provides the name for one of Webby’s sculptures, a precariously propped up ‘screen’ made of thick plaster and clay. One side is of curved and bulbous wave shapes that look like combed ice cream or crunchy meringue. Its back has embedded in its surface assorted pieces of a jigsaw, some connected and ‘legible’, of what looks like Mt. Fuji.

There is an implication here that just as one day Mt. Fuji, a volcano, will re-erupt, so will the extravagant lifestyle that luxury liners like the Costa Concordia and Titanic represent inevitably collapse. In other words, another bloody communist revolution is a palpable reality – not a fanciful pipe dream.