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.
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.
Fairryhead "junkyard 01" 30*40 Lightbox
Fairryhead "junkyard 02" 30*40 Lightbox
Fairyhead "Fairydust" C-print, 45X80 cm
Fairyhead "sweat" C-print, 55X80 cm
Fairyhead "Belly" C-print, 45X115 cm
Fairyhead "Nesting" C-print, 50X110 cm
Fairyhead "Flight" C-print, 54X72 cm
Fairyhead "Window" C-print, 190X240 cm