A sequence of four scenarios, each displaying a phase in the production, consumption and extermination of fairies. FAIRYHEAD VIDEO INSTALATION Ilan Yona’s ironic sweatshop is a factory for fairy-making, whose every worker is in the image of the artist. He is seen busy with manual labor, wholly immersed in a Sisyphean sewing work of disillusioned dreams, while a fault in production accidentally beheads one of the fairies. The video Installation presents various stages in the production, consumption and disposal of fairies. It presents a fictional world where the only existing merchandise is a fairy doll. The viewer is taken on a journey between a sweatshop where the fairies are manufactured, a point of view fly through the eye of a fairy into extinction, and an intimate encounter with the typical fairy consumer. In Yona’s work there is no waste, no dissipation, no extinction. They incorporate a potential for a by-product, but the shavings are not filth, they are fairy dust, twinkling diamond leftovers. On Chaff and Gold The artist creates a fantasy about labor and physical perspiration by using a computer. A sterile magic. Piles of junk which are planted in “nature” and never create dirt since they have never been manufactured. They are a digital prototype. Foreign to the material landscape, that becomes under their influence to fantastic. Chaff becomes gold, the banal becomes magical. The magic of the apprentice Yona duplicates himself, changes roles and parts in his idyllic fantasy. He is a flock of fairies, an army of sweatshop laborers, and a useless redneck. He is the ruler and the subjects, the apprentice and the magician. The work creates a one-man-utopia of an ultimate autarchic economy. He has no need for a relationship with the outer world. He is the producer and the consumer. Out of nothingness The work moves in a circular motion out of the futile effort to create something new. The fantasy in which the artist is living is based on familiar capitalistic values. Fairytales become new age products. Redundancy becomes a kitsch, fetishistic love. Point of view The characters which yona play are authentic and self-aware. They are committed to the fantasy in a physical way. Surrender to blinking lights, passively engaged by objects that seem to be bewitched. The magic is allowed only when a character is looking straight to the camera. This look returns the working materials to their earthy shape. Gold becomes chaff. IDYLL DISTORTION "Refined hyperrealism, aesthetic asceticism, Multi – progressive traveling, Interactive multi-dimensional, there is a lot to mock of " (Jean Baudrillard, America, p.48). Ilan Yona celebrates capitalism with humor and self-awareness. His Baudrillardrian world celebrates the social-moral distortion by deconstructing the visual narrative with intelligent use of cinematic language. Yona creates ex nihilo, builds hyper-reality, flooded with overused images & cinematic cliché. His fairies are mass production pieces, and refer to the only promised fantasy they hold. His characters are an extreme replica and a by-product to consumerism. Ilan Yona’s work motivates itself out of a strong urge to work within the boundaries of familiar genres. By appropriating the genre and twisting its rules of action Yona creates silent sabotaging acts. He melts together the various types without considering hierarchies of cultural and commercial, personal and social, arts and crafts. Yona creates pastiche by combining techniques of animation, three dimensional pre-visualization, video and photography thus creating replica clichés of the genres he manipulates. The distance created between Yona’s work and the original source, whether iconic or taken from readymade image banks, allows him to raise discussion that exists on the axis between the biographical and the social. Yona duplicates himself, changes roles and parts in his idyllic fantasy. He is the good, the bad & the ugly in a local suburb western, a flock of fairies, an army of laborers, a useless redneck and characters from a Japanese TV show who demonstrate the word ‘LOVE’ with their body (taken from a new video work that is in progress). Yona investigates a world where the distortion takes place as an exaggerated-hedonist-nihilist-capitalist party that lacks any moral reference, an Idyll Distortion.
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