Dan Webb – inanimate objects with a pulse

The oldest goal of sculpture is to be soul-catcher, not to mirror a surface but to find a pulse and praise it. Dan Webb finds that pulse on the surface. To the detritus of the world he brings his monumental ambition. A weed, a fly, a party favor; a prepackaged meal on a dinner tray, a person climbing the corporate ladder, a kid sharing a secret under a blanket, an anonymous set of armor banished to storage: What we no longer value or never valued, he redeems in the powerful mirror of his material abilities.

The depth of his work comes from its translations. A dandelion wilted and past its prime in the back yard is an annoyance, a reminder that there’s work to do or the yard in question is beyond work and past care. Let weeds flourish till the plot falls into other hands or is left to its own devices, eating a hole in the human hunger for order.

Webb’s weed rises to glory from a block of wood, fire burnt at its bottom with a pale, perfect tap root touching the floor. I saw this piece unfinished in the studio, as Webb was chiseling under the leaf rising on the left. “Stop,” I said, as I’d say to someone about to run out into traffic. I feared for the life of the thing.

Webb’s carving has a show-off quality. It’s a high wire act with no net, performed in front of an audience that is no longer sure such dazzling feats are worth watching. Isn’t excessive skill a trap for the unimaginative? When cameras can count every hair on your head, what is the point of verisimilitude?

WOODYLION, 2009
Carved Redwood
32 x 14 x 11 inches

The surface of the world is the world. Skill is a trap when it is excessive to the thing expressed. Webb lives in the precision he brings to bear on what is battered. It’s his signature. He’s breathing inside his homage to whatever is begotten without pleasure, born without care, and dies alone.

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Into that vast indifference, Webb asserts a form of recyling that he raises to the level of the  alchemical. His sculptures would mean nothing without the skill of his rendering. He didn’t attach the tap root to the bottom of the wood block and glue the carved weed to its top. Through the oldest process of sculptural subtraction, he found a spent weed inside a stump and let it out.


STONE FLY (FOR PETRUS), 2010
Carved gray marble
8.5 x 19 x 11 inches (Petrus is a mid-15th century painter famed for his ability to fool the eye, in this case, with a fly painted at the edge of his painting’s frame.)