Babel Revisited

Digitally constructed from an amalgam of different sources, Julee Holcombe’s photographs incorporate historical references within a Utopian vision. Her dreamscapes combine both ancient and contemporary urban structures, from Greco-Roman temples to towering skyscrapers. In Babel Revisited, the red excavator in the foreground alludes to the construction of the biblical Tower of Babel, supposed to have been built by a unified, monolingual people that God then challenged through the diversification of their speech. Often inspired by classical painting traditions, Holcombe recreates here the composition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel (c. 1563).