CLOCKWISE from Top Left: It Is What It Is, Ball On Ham, 2018. Digital inkjet, 12" x 19" • Do you Think I’m Special? 2018. Digital inkjet, 23.5" x 45.25" • Choose to Smile, 2018. 56 lollipops, doorstoppers, vinyl text, 30 min video on ipad, 63" x 72" x 7" • Ham Ball on the Wall, 2018. Silkscreen on deli wax paper, found plexiglass ball, 18" x 18"
Ella Weber: Sounds Good Omaha-based artist Ella Weber looks at connections between the everyday mundane, consumerism, sexuality, and spirituality through a suburban Midwestern ethos. As a resident of Nebraska, where the slogan is “The Good Life,” Weber questions what is meant by “good.” Politeness? Morality? Comfort? What does good sound like? What makes a good life? And is “good” good enough? After completing graduate school, Weber got a job slicing meat behind the deli counter at a chain grocery store. The artist merged her creative practice with her time on the clock, turning the deli into her studio. Exploring corporate culture, comfort and convenience, the polite interactions of a service industry job, and the realities artists face to balance their creative practice and their bills, Weber crafts a strange and playful world in which we question social ideals and aspirations. In her video Cycle, the artist escorts viewers through a hypnotic, consumer exchange in latex gloves.
“Hello. Welcome. It’s nice to meet you. You look nice. You seem nice. Is this your first time?” Weber narrates in a soft whisper reminiscent of ASMR videos and guided meditation. Slices of ham and sheets of waxed paper veil and partially reveal a series of the artist’s selfies during her lunch breaks, practicing smiling and wearing deli meat masks as an improvised skin care treatment. The spinning blade of a meat slicer reinforces the repetitive nature of everyday life in a consumer-oriented world. In equal parts comforting, monotonous, and sexualixed, the video transitions from predictable rhythms of customer service dialogue into confessional monologue about suburban social expectations and anxieties.
“Our turkey is cooked in its own natural juices, 100% self-absorbed in a cyclical pursuit of autonomous smiles. 100% pure white breast pressed into the flesh of the suburban moms and daughters alike, naturally low in fat, not flat, thinly trimmed and manicured by my hand to ensure the finest, most desirable cuts on the block.” COVER: He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands. 2018. Digital inkjet. 22" x 32"
Cycle, 2018. Video Stills
Ella – or Della, as she refers to herself while on the clock – has maintained employment at a grocery deli in a suburb of Omaha since 2015, while also living in her parent’s basement. Initially, this arrangement provided flexible supplementary income between artist residencies and adjunct teaching positions. What has emerged from this work is the fruit of circumstance and material, providing direct inroads for examining corporate, consumer, and suburban social behaviours through innuendo and double-entendre. As any veteran of the service industry knows, it’s the hours of small talk over the counter that become the labor’s banal refrain.
“Hi, How are you? I’m good, good, good, doing good, pretty good, not bad, I’m good I’m good.” Weber began to populate her social media accounts with dialogue from these customer interactions and assemblages of rejected deli product. After receiving a record low score for customer service from a corporate secret shopper – primarily for not satisfactorily smiling – Weber began to focus her creative inquiry on the “helpful smile” and the other veneers we use to present and protect ourselves publicly. Following this incident, her lunch breaks became studio sessions for practicing various smiles, captured as bathroom selfies.
“Sometimes, I bring ham into the bathroom and cover my face with a slice of ham, I am, a product in beauty that exfoliates my pores and eliminates my blemishes and masks my insecurities.”
Choose to Smile is a dual offering of innocence and innuendo. Sticky pink lollipops bounce on spring doorstops, surrounding a screen encasing the artist’s on-again, off-again smile. Over the duration of the video, her welcoming expression takes on an appearance of being practiced, forced, and even painful. Weber questions the reality of the polite-on-command service industry smile. What purpose does it serve? Do these scripted interactions result in one bobbing through daily life versus truly getting to know oneself, and be known? In her exchanges with customers, now displayed in print on waxed paper, Weber notes the oddly nondescript terms often used when confronted with questions about choice of product and quantity: “just some regular turkey,” “a mainstream salami,” “a good wad” of cold cuts “sliced nice.” Is a smile meant to distract us from the fact that we’re not sure what we really want, and lack the language to articulate it?
“Sounds Good.”
Cycle, 2018. Video Still
Agreeability reigns. Everyone is always good. The pleasant suburban sounds of lawnmowers, birds chirping, kids playing, sports, and bouncing balls in Weber’s video work are paired with noises of chewing, slapping, squishing, a spinning deli slicer, moistness, bouncing doorstops, and crinkling waxed paper. The nice sounds of “good” curdle into gross and then slide into monotony. The highly processed nature of deli product feeds Weber’s practice, serving as a metaphor for the multiple sensory aspects of social conditioning that produce comfortable, shelf-stable, and ultimately bland ambitions of midwestern suburbia.
“The skies are blue; the grass is green yet I’m left with a desire to pull myself out of the vinyl siding of sameness. Sure it is nice, but is this good? Is there more?
What comes after lunch?”
Pull Down to Refresh, 2018. Digital inkjet. 22" x 32"
Weber’s mother regularly reminds her that she is a “starving artist” – financially, if not literally. She has digested years of observation and documentation as a minimumwage worker in the suburbs, processing this fodder into a larger exploration of desire and access. Though raised in this environment of blue skies, manicured lawns, and presumed good and comfort, the artist often feels disconnected from these ideals, from adulthood, and from any genuine feelings behind the Midwest’s plentiful smiles. When presented with a world of fabricated options and a false sense of choice that obscure class and economic disparities, the deflated reality of a middling existence comes into focus. Where can we find true connection, satisfaction, or purpose? And how do we position and present ourselves to find it, receive it, and share it?
“Do you think I’m special?” Living in an ambivalent space – geographically, professionally, and psychologically – is the bedrock of Weber’s inquiry. How can we both blend in and be special? How can we be friendly and accommodating but also assert our needs and desires? How can we believe in something meaningful while spending so much time in service of empty consumerism? How can we maintain what we each want for our environments without forcing those same expectations on others? The artist invites us, as viewers, to join her in pondering these questions. By converting menial employment – something that can drain an artist of much time and creative headspace – into an unorthodox and expansive space for artmaking, Weber also invites possibility. Ultimately, Sounds Good offers a glimpse into a radical reframing of the most habitual aspects of our lives. – Essay by Amanda Smith, Exhibitions + Fellowship Manager
Headshot: Bill Sitzmann
ABOUT THE ARTIST Ella Weber intentionally maintains minimum wage jobs as a means to fuel her art, both financially and conceptually. In doing so, she utilizes various means to investigate the tension between consumer and viewer, performer and employee, artist and gallery. She earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Kansas. Weber has attended arts residencies at Oxbow School of Art, The Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Signal Culture, and most recently, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Artists in Residence Program in Utica, New York. The artist has exhibited nationally including exhibitions at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Suite & Bridges Gallery at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Project Project in Omaha, and the Cube Art Project in Lincoln, among many other venues. She has taught at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Pratt MWP College of Art and Design, and as a mentor in Joslyn Art Museum’s Kent Bellows Mentorship program.
Learn and Converse with us around the themes explored in Sounds Good: Radical Work-Life Wednesday, August 15, 6:30 pm Join the artist for a discussion about the realities of employment for creatives, her own practice, and how she turned a service-industry job into a form of DIY residency and studio.
Supporting The Arts, Strengthening Our Community.
The Wanda D. Ewing Gallery Open Tuesday–Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm
The Wanda D. Ewing Gallery is dedicated to the Omaha artist, educator, and supporter of The Union for Contemporary Art who passed away in 2013. Ewing encouraged dialogue around questions of who is allowed to make, see, and be seen in visual culture, and whether the arts look like the communities we live in, challenging her audiences to believe in the transformative power of art.
To view our exhibition schedule and for more info on the program, visit u-ca.org/exhibition.
2423 North 24th Street Omaha, NE 68110